The Fifth Child

Doris Lessing
was born of British parents in Persia (now Iran) in 1919
and was taken to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
when she was five. She spent her childhood on a large
farm there and first came to England in 1949. She
brought with her the manuscript of her first novel, The
Grass is Singing, which was published in 1950 with
outstanding success in Britain, in America, and in ten
European
countries.
Since
then
her
international
reputation not only as a novelist but as a non-fiction and
short story writer has flourished. For her collection
of short novels, Five, she was honoured with the 1954
Somerset Maugham Award. She was awarded the
Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1981,
and the German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize of
1982. Among her other celebrated novels are The
Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark,
Memoirs of a Survivor and the five volume Children of
Violence series. Her short stories have been collected in
a number of volumes, including To Room Nineteen and
The Temptation of Jack Orkney; while her African
stories appear in This Was the Old Chief's Country and
The Sun Between Their Feet. Shikasta, the first in a
series of five novels with the overall title of Canopus in
Argos: Archives, was published in 1979. Her novel The
Good Terrorist won the W. H. Smith Literary Award for
1985, and the Mondello Prize in Italy that year. The
Fifth Child won the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy, an
award voted on by students in their final year at school.
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 was made
into an opera with Philip Glass, libretto by the author,
and premiered in Houston. Her most recent works
include the novel, Ben, in the World (the sequel to The
Fifth Child) and two volumes of her autobiography,
Under My Skin, and Walking in the Shade.
By the same author
DORIS LESSING
NOVELS
The Grass is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
Memoirs of a Survivor
Diary of a Good Neighbour
If the Old Could ...
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
Playing the Game
(illustrated by Charlie Adlard)
Love, Again
Mara and Dann
Ben, in the World
'Canopus in Argos: Archives'
series Re: Colonised Planet 5,
Shikasta The Marriages Between Zones
SHORT STORIES
Five
The Habit of Loving
A Man and Two Women
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man
and Other Stories
Winter in July
The Black Madonna
This Was the Old Chief's Country
(Collected African Stories, Vol.1)
The Sun Between Their Feet
(Collected African Stories, Vol. 2)
To Room Nineteen
(Collected Stories, Vol.1)
The Temptation of Jack Orkney
(Collected Stories, Vol. 2)
London Observed
The Old Age of El Magnifico
Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for
Planet 8
Documents Relating to the
Sentimental Agents in the Volyen
Empire
POETRY
'Children of Violence' novelsequence
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
NON-FICTION
OPERAS
The Marriages Between Zones Three,
Four and Five (Music by
Philip Glass
The Making of the representative for
Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)
The Fifth Child
Fourteen Poems
DRAMA
Each His Own Wilderness
Play with a Tiger
The Singing Door
In Pursuit of the English
Particularly Cats
Rufus the Survivor
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
African Laughter
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Under My Skin: Volume I
Walking in the Shade: Volume II
Flamingo
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Flamingo
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
Flamingo is a registered trade mark of
HarperCollins Publishers Limited
www.fireandwater.com
Published by Flamingo 2001
987654321
Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1993
and by Paladin 1989
First published in Great Britain by
Jonathan Cape Ltd 1988
Copyright © Doris Lessing 1988
Doris Lessing asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,
characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the
author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Photograph of Doris Lessing by © Ingrid Von Kruse
ISBN 0 586 08903 9
Set in Melior
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or
otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it
is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The Fifth
Child
Harriet and David met each other at an office party
neither had particularly wanted to go to, and both
knew at once that this was what they had been waiting
for. Someone conservative, old-fashioned, not to say
obsolescent; timid, hard to please: this is what other
people called them, but there was no end to the
unaffectionate adjectives they earned. They
defended
a stubbornly held view of themselves, which was that
they were ordinary and in the right of it, should not be
criticized for emotional fastidiousness, abstemiousness, just because these were unfashionable qualities.
At this famous office party, about two hundred
people crammed into a long, ornate, and solemn room,
for three hundred and thirty-four days of the year a
boardroom. Three associated firms, all to do with
putting up buildings, were having their end-of-year
party. It was noisy. The pounding rhythm of a small
band shook walls and floor. Most people were dancing,
packed close because of lack of space, couples bobbing
up and down or revolving in one spot as if they were
on invisible turntables. The women were dressed up,
dramatic, bizarre, full of colour: Look at me! Look at
me! Some of the men demanded as much attention.
Around the walls were pressed a few non-dancers, and
7
among these were Harriet and David, standing by
themselves, holding glasses - observers. Both had
reflected that the faces of the dancers, women more
than men, but men, too, could just as well have been
distorted in screams and grimaces of pain as in enjoyment. There was a forced hecticity to the scene ... but
these thoughts, like so many others, they had not
expected to share with anyone else.
From across the room - if one saw her at all among
so many eye-demanding people - Harriet was a pastel
blur. As in an Impressionist picture, or a trick photograph, she seemed a girl merged with her surroundings. She stood near a great vase of dried grasses and
leaves and her dress was something flowery. The
focusing eye then saw curly dark hair, which was
unfashionable ... blue eyes, soft but thoughtful
...
lips rather too firmly closed. In fact, all her features
were strong and good, and she was solidly built. A
healthy young woman, but perhaps more at home in a
garden?
David had been standing just where he was for an
hour drinking judiciously, his serious grey-blue eyes
taking their time over this person, that couple, watching how people engaged and separated, ricocheting off
each other. To Harriet he did not have the look of
someone solidly planted: he seemed almost to hover,
balancing on the balls of his feet. A slight young man
- he looked younger than he was - he had a round,
candid face and soft brown hair girls longed to run
their fingers through, but then that contemplative gaze
of his made itself felt and they desisted. He made them
feel uncomfortable. Not Harriet. She knew his look of
watchful apartness mirrored her own. She judged his
8
humorous air to be an effort. He was making similar
mental comments about her: she seemed to dislike
these occasions as much as he did. Both had found out
who the other was. Harriet was in the sales department
of a firm that designed and supplied building
materials; David was an architect.
So what was it about these two that made them
freaks and oddballs? It was their attitude to sex! This
was the sixties! David had had one long and difficult
affair with a girl he was reluctantly in love with: she
was what he did not want in a girl. They joked about
the attraction between opposites. She joked that he
thought of reforming her: 'I do believe you imagine
you are going to put the clock back, starting with me!'
Since they had parted, unhappily enough, she had
slept - so David reckoned - with everyone in Sissons
Blend & Co. With the girls, too, he wouldn't be surprised. She was here tonight, in a scarlet dress with
black lace, a witty travesty of a flamenco dress. From
this concoction her head startingly emerged. It was
pure nineteen-twenties, for her black hair was sleeked
down into a spike on her neck at the back, with two
glossy black spikes over her ears, and a black lock on
her forehead. She sent frantic waves and kisses to
David from across the room where she circled with her
partner, and he smiled matily back: no hard feelings.
As for Harriet, she was a virgin. 'A virgin now,' her girl
friends might shriek; 'are you crazy?' She had not
thought of herself as a virgin, if this meant a physiological condition to be defended, but rather as something like a present wrapped up in layers of deliciously
pretty paper, to be given, with discretion, to the right
person. Her own sisters laughed at her. The girls
9
working in the office looked studiedly humorous when
she insisted, 'I am sorry, I don't like all this sleeping
around, it's not for me.' She knew she was discussed
as an always interesting subject, and usually unkindly.
With the same chilly contempt that good women of her
grandmother's generation might have used, saying,
'She is quite immoral you know,' or, 'She's no better
than she ought to be,' or, 'She hasn't got a moral to her
name'; then (her mother's generation), 'She's manmad,' or, 'She's a nympho' - so did the enlightened
girls of now say to each other, 'It must be something in
her childhood that's made her like this. Poor thing.'
And indeed she had sometimes felt herself unfortunate or deficient in some way, because the men with
whom she went out for a meal or to the cinema would
take her refusal as much as evidence of a pathological
outlook as an ungenerous one. She had gone about
with a girl friend, younger than the others, for a time,
but then this one had become 'like all the others', as
Harriet despairingly defined her, defining herself as a
misfit. She spent many evenings alone, and went home
often at weekends to her mother. Who said, 'Well,
you're old-fashioned, that's all. And a lot of girls would
like to be, if they got the chance.'
These two eccentrics, Harriet and David, set off from
their respective corners towards each other at the same
moment: this was to be important to them as the
famous office party became part of their story. 'Yes, at
exactly the same time . . .' They had to push past
people already squeezed against walls; they held their
glasses high above their heads to keep them out of the
way of the dancers. And so they arrived together at
last, smiling - but perhaps a trifle anxiously - and he
10
took her hand and they squeezed their way out of this
room into the next, which had the buffet and was as
full of noisy people, and through that into a corridor,
sparsely populated with embracing couples, and then
pushed open the first door whose handle yielded to
them. It was an office that had a desk and hard chairs,
and, as well, a sofa. Silence
. . . well, almost. They
sighed. They set down their glasses. They sat facing
each other, so they might look as much as they wished,
and then began to talk. They talked as if talk were what
had been denied to them both, as if they were starving
for talk. And they went on sitting there, close, talking,
until the noise began to lessen in the rooms across the
corridor, and then they went quietly out and to his flat,
which was near. There they lay on his bed holding
hands and talked, and sometimes kissed, and then
slept. Almost at once she moved into his flat, for she
had been able to afford only a room in a big communal
l fat. They had already decided to marry in the spring.
Why wait? They were made for each other.
Harriet was the oldest of three daughters. It was not
until she left home, at eighteen, that she knew how
much she owed to her childhood, for many of her
friends had divorced parents, led adventitious and
haphazard lives, and tended to be, as it is put, disturbed. Harriet was not disturbed, and had always
known what she wanted. She had done well enough at
school, and went to an arts college where she became
a graphic designer, which seemed an agreeable way of
spending her time until she married. The question
whether to be, or not to be, a career woman had never
bothered her, though she was prepared to discuss it:
she did not like to appear more eccentric than she had
11
to be. Her mother was a contented woman who had
everything she could reasonably want; so it appeared
to her and to her daughters. Harriet's parents had taken
it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy
one.
David's background was a quite different matter. His
parents had divorced when he was seven. He joked, far
too often, that he had two sets of parents: he had been
one of the children with a room in two homes, and
everybody considerate about psychological problems.
There had been no nastiness or spite, if plenty of
discomfort, even unhappiness - that is, for the children. His mother's second husband, David's other
father, was an academic, an historian, and there was a
large shabby house in Oxford. David liked this man,
Frederick Burke, who was kind, if remote, like his
mother, who was kind and remote. His room in this
house had been his home - was, in his imagination,
his real home now, though soon, with Harriet, he
would create another, an extension and amplification
of it. This home of his was a large bedroom at the back
of the house overlooking a neglected garden; a shabby
room, full of his boyhood, and rather chilly, in the
English manner. His real father married one of his
kind: she was a noisy, kind, competent woman, with
the cynical good humour of the rich. James Lovatt was
a boat builder, and when David did consent to visit,
his place could easily be a bunk on a yacht, or a room
('This is your room, David!') in a villa in the South of
France or the West Indies. But he preferred his old
room in Oxford. He had grown up with a fierce private
demand on his future: for his own children it would
all be different. He knew what he wanted, and the kind
12
of woman he needed. If Harriet had seen her future in
the old way, that a man would hand her the keys of
her kingdom, and there she would find everything her
nature demanded, and this as her birthright, which she
had - at first unknowingly, but then very determinedly
- been travelling towards, refusing all muddles and
dramas, then he saw his future as something he must
aim for and protect. His wife must be like him in this:
that she knew where happiness lay and how to keep it.
He was thirty when he met Harriet, and he had been
working in the dogged disciplined manner of an
ambitious man: but what he was working for was a
home.
Not possible to find the kind of house they wanted,
for the life they wanted, in London. Anyway, they
were not sure London was what they needed - no, it
wasn't, they would prefer a smallish town with an
atmosphere of its own. Weekends were spent looking
around towns within commuting distance of London,
and they soon found a large Victorian house in an
overgrown garden. Perfect! But for a young couple it
was absurd, a three-storeyed house, with an attic, full
of rooms, corridors, landings . . . Full of space for
children, in fact.
But they meant to have a lot of children. Both,
somewhat defiantly, because of the enormity of their
demands on the future, announced they 'would not
mind' a lot of children. `Even four, or five . . .' 'Or six,'
said David. 'Or six!' said Harriet, laughing to the point
of tears from relief. They had laughed and rolled about
the bed and kissed and were exuberant because this,
the place where both had expected and even been
prepared to accept rebuff or a compromise, had turned
13
out to be no danger at all. But while Harriet could say
to David, David to Harriet, `Six children at least,' they
could not say this to anyone else. Even with David's
quite decent salary, and Harriet's, the mortgage of this
house would be beyond them. But they would manmage somehow. She would work for two years, commute with David daily to London, and then ...
On the afternoon the house became theirs, they stood
hand in hand in the little porch, birds singing all
around them in the garden where boughs were still
black and glistening with the chilly rain of early spring.
They unlocked their front door, their hearts thudding
with happiness, and stood in a very large room, facing
capacious stairs. Some previous owner had seen a
home as they did. Walls had been pulled down to
make this a room that accommodated nearly all the
ground floor. One half of it was a kitchen, marked off
from the rest by no more than a low wall that would
have books on it, the other half with plenty of space
for settees, chairs, all the sprawl and comfort of a
family room. They went gently, softly, hardly breathing, smiling and looking at each other and smiling
even more because both had tears in their eyes - they
went across the bare boards that soon would have rugs
on them, and then slowly up the stairs where oldfashioned brass rods waited for a carpet. On the landing, they turned to marvel at the great room that would
be the heart of their kingdom. They went on up. The
i f rst floor had one large bedroom - theirs; and opening
off it a smallish room, which would be for each new
baby. There were four other decent rooms on this floor.
Up still generous but narrower stairs, and there were
four more rooms whose windows, like the rooms
14
below, showed trees, gardens, lawns - all the perspectives of pleasant suburbia. And above this floor was an
enormous attic, just right for the children when they
had got to the age for secret magical games.
They slowly descended the stairs, one flight, two,
passing rooms, and rooms, which they were imagining
full of children, relatives, guests, and came again into
their bedroom. A large bed had been left in it. It had
been specially made, that bed, for the couple they had
bought the house from. To take it away, so said the
agent, would have meant dismantling it, and anyway
the owners of the bed were going to live abroad. There
Harriet and David lay down side by side, and looked
at their room. They were quiet, awed by what they
were taking on. Shadows from a lilac tree, a wet sun
behind it, seemed to be enticingly sketching on the
expanses of the ceiling the years they would live in
this house. They turned their heads towards the windows where the top of the lilac showed its vigorous
buds, soon to burst into flower. Then they looked at
each other. Tears ran down their cheeks. They made
love, there, on their bed. Harriet almost cried out, 'No,
stop! What are we doing?' For had they not decided to
put off having children for two years? But she was
overwhelmed by his purpose - yes, that was it, he was
making love with a deliberate, concentrated intensity,
looking into her eyes, that made her accept him, his
taking possession of the future in her. She did not have
contraceptives with her. (Both of course distrusted the
Pill.) She was at the height of her fertility. But they
made love, with this solemn deliberation. Once. Twice.
Later, when the room was dark, they made love again.
M ell,' said Harriet, in a little voice, for she was
15
frightened and determined not to show it, 'Well, that's
done it, I'm sure.'
He laughed. A loud, reckless, unscrupulous laugh,
quite unlike modest, humorous, judicious David. Now
the room was quite dark, it looked vast, like a black
cave that had no end. A branch scraped across a wall
somewhere close. There was a smell of cold rainy earth
and sex. David lay smiling to himself, and when he felt
her look, he turned his head slightly and his smile
included her. But on his terms; his eyes gleamed with
thoughts she could not guess at. She felt she did not
know him... . 'David,' she said quickly, to break the
spell, but his arm tightened around her, and he gripped
her upper arm with a hand she had not believed could
be so strong, insistent. This grip said, Be quiet.
They lay there together while ordinariness slowly
came back, and then they were able to turn to each
other and kiss with small reassuring daytime kisses.
They got up and dressed in the cold dark: the electricity wasn't on yet. Quietly they went down the stairs of
their house where they had so thoroughly taken possession, and into their great family room, and let
themselves out into the garden that was mysterious
and hidden from them, not yet theirs.
'Well?' said Harriet humorously as they got into his
car to return to London. 'And how are we going to pay
for it all if I am pregnant?'
Quite so: how were they? Harriet indeed became
pregnant on that rainy evening in their bedroom. They
had many bad moments, thinking of the slenderness of
their resources, and of their own frailty. For at such
times, when material support is not enough, it is as if
we are being judged: Harriet and David seemed to
16
themselves meagre and inadequate, with nothing to
hold on to but stubborn beliefs other people had
always judged as wrong-headed.
David had never taken money from his well-off
father and stepmother, who had paid for his education,
but that was all. (And for his sister Deborah's education; but she had preferred her father's way of life as he
had preferred his mother's, and so they had not
often met, and the differences between brother and
sister seemed to him summed up in this - that she had
chosen the life of the rich.) He did not now want to ask
for money. His English parents - which was how he
thought of his mother and her husband - had little
money, being unambitious academics.
One afternoon, these four - David and Harriet, David's mother, Molly, with Frederick - stood in the
family room by the stairs and surveyed the new kingdom. There was by now a very large table, which
would easily accommodate fifteen or twenty people, at
the kitchen end; there were a couple of vast sofas, and
some commodious armchairs bought second-hand at a
local auction. David and Harriet stood together, feeling
themselves even more preposterously eccentric, and
much too young, faced with these two elderly people
who judged them. Molly and Frederick were large and
untidy, with a great deal of grey hair, wearing comfortable clothes that complacently despised fashion. They
looked like benevolent haystacks, but were not looking
at each other in a way David knew well.
'All right, then,' he said humorously, unable to bear
the strain, 'you can say it.' And he put his arm around
Harriet, who was pale and strained because of morning
17
sickness and because she had spent a week scrubbing
f loors and washing windows.
'Are you going to run a hotel?' enquired Frederick
reasonably, determined not to make a judgement.
'How many children are you intending to have?'
asked Molly, with the short laugh that means there is
no point in protesting.
'A lot,' said David softly.
'Yes,' said Harriet. 'Yes.' She did not realize, as
David did, how annoyed these two parents were.
Aiming, like all their kind, at an appearance of unconformity, they were in fact the essence of convention,
and disliked any manifestation of the spirit of exaggeration, of excess. This house was that.
'Come on, we'll give you dinner, if there is a decent
hotel,' said David's mother.
Over that meal, other subjects were discussed until,
over coffee, Molly observed, 'You do realize that you
are going to have to ask your father for help?'
David seemed to wince and suffer, but he had to face
it: what mattered was the house and the life that would
be lived in it. A life that - both parents knew because
of his look of determined intention, which they judged
full of the smugness of youth - was going to annul,
absolve, cancel out all the deficiencies of their life,
Molly's and Frederick's; and of James's and Jessica's
life, too.
As they separated in the dark car-park of the hotel,
Frederick, said, 'As far as I'm concerned, you are both
rather mad. Well, wrong-headed, then.'
'Yes,' said Molly. 'You haven't really thought it out.
Children ... no one who hasn't had them knows what
work they make.'
18
Here David laughed, making a point - and an old
one, which Molly recognized, and faced, with a conscious laugh. 'You are not maternal,' said David. 'It's
not your nature. But Harriet is.'
'Very well,' said Molly, 'it's your life.'
She telephoned James, her first husband, who was
on a yacht near the Isle of Wight. This conversation
ended with 'I think you should come and see for
yourself.'
'Very well, I will,' said he, agreeing as much to what
had not been said as to what had: his difficulty in
keeping up with his wife's unspoken languages was
the main reason he had been pleased to leave her.
Soon after this conversation, David and Harriet again
stood with David's parents
- the other pair - in
contemplation of the house. This time they were outside it. Jessica stood in the middle of a lawn still
covered with the woody debris of the winter and a
windy spring, and critically surveyed the house. To
her it was gloomy and detestable, like England. She
was the same age as Molly and looked twenty years
younger, being lean and brown and seeming to glisten
with sun oil even when her skin was without it. Her
hair was yellow and short and shiny and her clothes
bright. She dug the heels of her jade-green shoes in the
lawn and looked at her husband, James.
He had already been over the house and now he
said, as David had expected. 'It's a good investment.'
'Yes,' said David.
'It's not overpriced. I suppose that's because it's too
big for most people. I take it the surveyor's report was
all right?'
'Yes,' said David.
19
'In that case I shall assume responsibility for the
mortgage. How long is it going to take to pay off?'
'Thirty years,' said David.
'I'll be dead by then, I expect. Well, I didn't give you
much in the way of a wedding present.'
`You'll have to do the same by Deborah,' said Jessica.
`We have already done much more for Deborah than
for David,' said James. `Anyway, we can afford it.'
She laughed, and shrugged: it was mostly her money.
This ease with money characterized their life together,
which David had sampled and rejected fiercely, preferring the parsimony of the Oxford house - though he
had never used that word aloud. Flashy and too easy,
that was the life of the rich; but now he was going to
be beholden to it.
`And how many kids are you planning, if one may
ask?' enquired Jessica, looking like a parakeet perched
on that damp lawn.
'A lot,' said David.
'A lot,' said Harriet.
'Rather you than me, then,' said Jessica, and with
that David's other parents left the garden, and then
England, with relief.
Now entered on to this scene Dorothy, Harriet's
mother. It occurred to neither Harriet nor David to
think, or say, `Oh God, how awful, having one's mother
around all the time,' for if family life was what they
had chosen, then it followed that Dorothy should come
indefinitely to help Harriet, while insisting that she
had a life of her own to which she must return. She
was a widow, and this life of hers was mostly visiting
her daughters. The family house was sold, and she had
a small flat, not very nice, but she was not one to
20
complain. When she had taken in the size and potential of the new house, she was more silent than usual
for some days. She had not found it easy bringing up
three girls. Her husband had been an industrial chemist, not badly paid, but there never had been much
money. She knew the cost, in every way, of a family,
even a small one.
She attempted some remarks on these lines one
evening at supper. David, Harriet, Dorothy. David had
just come home late: the train was delayed. Commuting
was not going to be much fun, was going to be the
worst of it, for everyone, but particularly of course for
David, for it would take nearly two hours twice a day
to get to and from work. This would be one of his
contributions to the dream.
The kitchen was already near what it ought to be:
the great table, with heavy wooden chairs around it -only four now, but more stood in a row along the wall,
waiting for guests and still unborn people. There was
a big stove, an Aga, and an old-fashioned dresser with
cups and mugs on hooks. Jugs were full of flowers from
the garden where summer had revealed a plenitude of
roses and lilies. They were eating a traditional English
pudding, made by Dorothy; outside, the autumn was
establishing itself in flying leaves that sometimes hit
the windowpanes with small thuds and bangs, and in
the sound of a rising wind. But the curtains were
drawn, warm thick flowered curtains.
'You know,' said Dorothy, 'I've been thinking about
you two.' David put down his spoon to listen as he
would never have done for his unworldly mother, or
his worldly father. 'I don't believe you two ought to
rush into everything - no, let me have my say. Harriet
21
is only twenty-four - not twenty-five yet. You are only
just thirty, David. You two go on as if you believe if
you don't grab everything, then you'll lose it. Well,
that's the impression I get, listening to you talk.'
David and Harriet were listening: their eyes did
meet, frowning, thoughtful. Dorothy, this large, wholesome, homely woman, with her decisive manner, her
considered ways, was not to be ignored; they recognized what was due to her.
'I do feel that,' said Harriet.
'Yes, girl, I know. You were talking yesterday of
having another baby straight away. You'll regret it, in
my view.'
'Everything could very well be taken away,' said
David, stubborn. The enormity of this, something that
came from his depths, as both women knew, was not
lessened by the News, which was blasting from the
radio. Bad news from everywhere: nothing to what the
News would soon become, but threatening enough.
'Think about it,' said Dorothy. 'I wish you would.
Sometimes you two scare me. I don't really know why.'
Harriet said fiercely, 'Perhaps we ought to have been
born into another country. Do you realize that having
six children, in another part of the world, it would be
normal, nothing shocking about it - they aren't made
to feel criminals.'
'It's we who are abnormal, here in Europe,' said
David.
'I don't know about that,' said Dorothy, as stubborn
as either of them. 'But if you were having six - or eight,
or ten - no, I know what you are thinking, Harriet, I
know you, don't I? - and if you were in another part of
the world, like Egypt or India or somewhere, then half
22
of them would die and they wouldn't be educated,
either. You want things both ways. The aristocracy yes, they can have children like rabbits, and expect to,
but they have the money for it. And poor people can
have children, and half of them die, and expect to. But
people like us, in the middle, we have to be careful
about the children we have so we can look after them.
It seems to me you haven't thought it out ... no, I'll go
and make the coffee, you two go and sit down.'
David and Harriet went through the wide gap in the
wall that marked off the kitchen to the sofa in the
living-room, where they sat holding hands, a slight,
stubborn, rather perturbed young man, and an enormous, flushed, clumsily moving woman. Harriet was
eight months pregnant, and it had not been an easy
pregnancy. Nothing seriously wrong, but she had been
sick a lot, slept badly from indigestion, and was disappointed with herself. They were wondering why it was
that people always criticized them. Dorothy brought coffee,
set it down, said, 'I'll do the washing-up - no, you just sit
there.' And went back to the sink.
'But it is what I feel,' said Harriet, distressed. 'Yes.'
'We should have children while we can,' said
Harriet.
Dorothy said, from the sink, 'At the beginning of the
last war, people were saying it was irresponsible to
have children, but we had them, didn't we?' She
laughed.
'There you are, then,' said David.
'And we kept them,' said Dorothy.
'Well, here I am certainly,' said Harriet.
The first baby, Luke, was born in the big bed
23
attended mostly by the midwife, with Dr Brett there,
too. David and Dorothy held Harriet's hands. It goes
without saying that the doctor had wanted Harriet in
hospital. She had been adamant; was disapproved of by him.
It was a windy cold night, just after Christmas. The
room was warm and wonderful. David wept. Dorothy
wept. Harriet laughed and wept. The midwife and the
doctor had a little air of festivity and triumph. They all
drank champagne, and poured some on little Luke's
head. It was 1966.
Luke was an easy baby. He slept most peaceably in
the little room off the big bedroom, and was contentedly breast-fed. Happiness! When David went off to
catch his train to London in the mornings, Harriet was
sitting up in bed feeding the baby, and drinking the tea
David had brought her. When he bent to kiss her
goodbye, and stroked Luke's head, it was with a fierce
possessiveness that Harriet liked and understood, for
it was not herself being possessed, or the baby, but
happiness. Hers and his.
That Easter was the first of the family parties. Rooms
had been adequately if sketchily furnished, and they
were filled with Harriet's two sisters, Sarah and
Angela, and their husbands and their children; with
Dorothy, in her element; and briefly by Molly and
Frederick, who allowed that they were enjoying themselves but family life on this scale was not for them.
Connoisseurs of the English scene will by now have
realized that on that powerful, if nowhere registered,
yardstick, the English class system, Harriet scaled
rather lower than David. Within five seconds of any of
the Lovatts or the Burkes meeting any of the Walkers,
24
the fact had been noted but not commented on verbally, at least. The Walkers were not surprised that
Frederick and Molly said they would be there for only
two days; not that they changed their minds when
James Lovatt appeared. Like many husbands and wives
forced to separate by incompatibility, Molly and James
enjoyed meeting when they knew they must shortly
part. In fact, they all enjoyed themselves, agreeing that
the house was made for it. Around the great family
table, where so many chairs could be comfortably
accommodated, people sat through long pleasant
meals, or found their way there between meals to drink
coffee and tea, and to talk. And laugh ... Listening to
the laughter, the voices, the talk, the sounds of children
playing, Harriet and David in their bedroom, or perhaps descending from the landing, would reach for
each other's hand, and smile, and breathe happiness.
No one knew, not even Dorothy - certainly not Dorothy
- that Harriet was pregnant again. Luke was three
months old. They had not meant for Harriet to be
pregnant - not for another year. But so it was. `There's
something progenitive about this room, I swear it,' said
David, laughing. They felt agreeably guilty. They lay
in their bed, listening to Luke make his baby noises
next door, and decided not to say a word until after
everyone had gone.
When Dorothy was told, she was again rather silent,
and then said, 'Well, you'll need me, won't you?'
They did. This pregnancy, like the other, was
normal, but Harriet was uncomfortable and sick, and
thought to herself that while she had not changed her
mind at all about six (or eight or ten) children, she
25
would be jolly sure there was a good interval between
this one and the next.
For the rest of the year, Dorothy was pleasantly
around the house, helped look after Luke and to make
curtains for the rooms on the third floor.
That Christmas, Harriet was again enormous, in her
eighth month, and she laughed at herself for her size
and unwieldiness. The house was full. All the people
who were here for Easter came again. It was acknowledged that Harriet and David had a gift for this kind of
thing. A cousin of Harriet's with three children came,
too, for she had heard of the wonderful Easter party
that had gone on for a week. A colleague of David's
came with his wife. This Christmas was ten days long,
and one feast followed another. Luke was in his pram
downstairs and everyone fussed over him, and the
older children carried him around like a doll. Briefly,
too, came David's sister Deborah, a cool attractive girl
who could easily have been Jessica's daughter and not
Molly's. She was not married, though she had had
what she described as near misses. In general style she
was so far removed from the people in the house, all
basic British - as they defined themselves relative to
her - that these differences became a running joke. She
had always lived the life of the rich, had found the
shabby high-mindedness of her mother's house irritating, hated people being crammed together, but conceded that she found this party interesting.
There were twelve adults and ten children. Neighbours, invited, did appear, but the sense of family
togetherness was strong and excluded them. And Harriet and David exulted that they, their obstinacy, what
everyone had criticized and laughed at, had succeeded
26
in this miracle: they were able to unite all these so
different people, and make them enjoy each other.
The second child, Helen, was born, like Luke, in the
family bed, with all the same people there, and again
champagne anointed the baby's head, and everyone
wept. Luke was evicted from the baby's room into the
next one down the corridor, and Helen took his place.
Though Harriet was tired - indeed, worn out - the
Easter party took place. Dorothy was against it. `You
are tired, girl,' she said. 'You are bone tired.' Then,
seeing Harriet's face: `Well, all right, but you aren't to
do anything, mind.'
The two sisters and Dorothy made themselves
responsible for the shopping and the cooking, the hard
work.
Downstairs among all the people - for the house was
again full - were the two little creatures, Helen and
Luke, all wispy fair hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks.
Luke was staggering about, aided by everyone, and
Helen was in her pram.
That summer - it was 1968 - the house was full to
the attic, nearly all family. The house was so convenient for London: people travelled up with David for
the day and came back with him. There was good
walking country twenty minutes' drive away.
People came and went, said they were coming for a
couple of days and stayed a week. And how was all
this paid for? Well, of course everyone contributed;
and, of course, not enough, but people knew David's
father was rich. Without that mortgage being paid for,
none of this could have happened. Money was always
tight. Economies were made: a vast hotel-size freezer
bought second-hand was stocked with summer fruit
27
and vegetables. Dorothy and Sarah and Angela bottled
fruit and jam and chutneys. They baked bread and the
whole house smelled of new bread. This was happiness, in the old style.
There was a cloud, though. Sarah and her husband,
William, were unhappily married, and quarrelled, and
made up, but she was pregnant with her fourth, and a
divorce was not possible.
Christmas, just as wonderful a festival, came and
went. Then Easter . . . sometimes they all had to
wonder where everybody was fitting themselves in.
The cloud on family happiness that was Sarah and
William's discord disappeared, for it was absorbed in
worse. Sarah's new baby was Down's syndrome, and
there was no question of them separating. Dorothy
remarked sometimes that it was a pity there wasn't two
of her, Sarah needed her as much, and more, than
Harriet. And indeed she did take off on visits to her
Sarah, who was afflicted, while Harriet was not.
Jane was born in 1970, when Helen was two. Much
too fast, scolded Dorothy, what was the hurry?
Helen moved into Luke's room, and Luke moved one
room along. Jane made her contented noises in the
baby's room, and the two little children came into the
big family bed and cuddled and played games, or they
visited Dorothy in her bed and played there.
Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a
happy family. It was what they had chosen and what
they deserved. Often, when David and Harriet lay face
to face, it seemed that doors in their breasts flew open,
and what poured out was an intensity of relief, of
thankfulness, that still astonished them both: patience
for what seemed now such a very long time had not
28
been easy, after all. It had been hard preserving their
belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the
greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves.
And look, they had been right to insist on guarding
that stubborn individuality of theirs, which had
chosen, and so obstinately, the best - this.
Outside this fortunate place, their family, beat and
battered the storms of the world. The easy good times
had utterly gone. David's firm had been struck, and he
had not been given the promotion he expected; but
others had lost their jobs and he was lucky. Sarah's
husband was out of work. Sarah joked dolefully that
she and William attracted all the ill luck in the clan.
Harriet said to David, privately, that she did not
believe it was bad luck: Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarelling, had probably attracted the
mongol child - yes, yes, of course she knew one
shouldn't call them mongol. But the little girl did look
a bit like Genghis Khan, didn't she? A baby Genghis
Khan with her squashed little face and her slitty eyes?
David disliked this trait of Harriet's, a fatalism that
seemed so at odds with the rest of her. He said he
thought this was silly hysterical thinking: Harriet
sulked and they had to make up.
The little town they lived in had changed in the five
years they had been here. Brutal incidents and crimes,
once shocking everyone, were now commonplace.
Gangs of youths hung around certain cafes and streetends and owed respect to no one. The house next door
had been burgled three times: the Lovatts' not yet, but
then there were always people about. At the end of the
29
road there was a telephone box that had been vandalized so often the authorities had given up: it stood
unusable. These days, Harriet would not dream of
walking at night by herself, but once it would not have
occurred to her not to go anywhere she pleased at any
time of the day or night. There was an ugly edge on
events: more and more it seemed that two peoples
lived in England, not one - enemies, hating each other,
who could not hear what the other said. The young
Lovatts made themselves read the papers, and watch
the News on television, though their instinct was to do
neither. At least they ought to know what went on
outside their fortress, their kingdom, in which three
precious children were nurtured, and where so many
people came to immerse themselves in safety, comfort,
kindness.
The fourth baby, Paul, was born in 1973, between a
Christmas and an Easter. Harriet was not very well: her
pregnancies had continued uncomfortable and full of
minor problems - nothing serious, but she was tired.
The Easter festivities were the best ever: that year
was the best of all their years, and, looking back
afterwards, it seemed that the whole year was a celebration, renewed from a spring of loving hospitality
whose guardians were Harriet and David, beginning at
Christmas when Harriet was so very pregnant, everyone looking after her, sharing in the work of creating
magnificent meals, involved with the coming baby ...
knowing that Easter was coming, then the long
summer, then Christmas again ...
Easter went on for three weeks, all of the school
holidays. The house was crammed. The three little
children had their own rooms but moved in together
30
when beds were needed. Which of course they adored.
'Why not let them sleep together always?' Dorothy, the
others would enquire. 'A room each for such little
tiddlers!'
'It's important,' said David, fierce; 'everyone should
have a room.'
The family exchanged glances as families do when
stubbing toes on some snag in one of them: and Molly,
who felt herself both appreciated but in some devious
way criticised, too, said, 'Everyone in the world! Everybody!' She had intended to sound humorous.
This scene was at breakfast - or, rather, mid-morning
- in the family room, breakfast continuing indefinitely.
All the adults were still around the table, fifteen of
them. The children played among the sofas and chairs
of the sitting-room area. Molly and Frederick sat side
by side, as always, preserving their air of judging
everything by the perspectives of Oxford, for which,
here, they often got teased, but did not seem to mind,
and were humorously on the defensive. David's father,
James, had been written to again by Molly, who had
said he must 'fork out' more money, the young couple
simply were not coping with feeding Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. He had sent a generous cheque and then
had come himself. He sat opposite his former wife and
her husband, and as usual both kinds of people were
observed examining each other and marvelling that
they could ever have come together. He looked fitted
out for some sporting occasion: in fact, he was off
skiing shortly, like Deborah, who was here with her
little air of an exotic bird that had alighted in a strange
place and was kept there by curiosity - she was not
31
going to admit to admiration. Dorothy was there, dispensing tea and coffee. Angela sat with her husband;
her three children played with the others. Angela,
efficient, brisk ('a coper,' as Dorothy said, the 'thank
God' being unspoken), allowed it to be known that she
felt the two other sisters took up all of Dorothy and left
her nothing. She was like a clever, pretty little fox.
Sarah, Sarah's husband, cousins, friends
- the big
house had people tucked into every corner, even on
the sofas down here. The attic had long ago become a
dormitory stacked with mattresses and sleeping bags
in which any number of children could be bedded. As
they sat here in the great warm comfortable room,
which had a fire burning of wood collected by everyone yesterday from the woodland they had been walking in, the rooms above resounded with voices, and
with music. Some of the older children were practising
a song. This was a house - and this defined it for
everyone, admiring what they could not achieve themselves - where television was not often watched.
Sarah's husband, William, was not at the table, but
lounging against the dividing wall; and the little distance expressed what he felt his relation to the family
was. He had left Sarah twice, and come home again. It
was evident to everyone this was a process that would
continue. He had got himself a job, a poor one, in the
building trade: the trouble was that he was distressed
by physical disability, and his new daughter, the
Down's syndrome baby, appalled him. Yet he was very
much married to Sarah. They were a match: both tall,
generously built, dark, like a pair of gypsies, always in
colourful clothes. But the poor baby was in Sarah's
32
arms, covered up so as not to upset everyone, and
William was looking everywhere but at his wife.
He looked instead at Harriet, who sat nursing Paul,
two months old, in the big chair that was hers because
it was comfortable for this function. She looked
exhausted. Jane had been awake in the night with her
teeth, and had wanted Mummy, not Granny.
She had not been much changed by presenting the
world with four human beings. She sat there at the
head of the table, the collar of her blue shirt pushed to
one side to show part of a blue-veined white breast,
and Paul's energetically moving little head. Her lips
were characteristically firmly set, and she was observing everything: a healthy, attractive young woman, full
of life. But tired . . . the children came rushing from
their play to demand her attention, and she was suddenly irritable, and snapped, 'Why don't you go and
play upstairs in the attic?' This was unlike her - again
glances were exchanged among the adults, who took
over the job of getting the children's noise out of her
way. In the end, it was Angela who went with them.
Harriet was distressed because she had been badtempered. 'I was up all night,' she began, and William
interrupted her, taking command - expressing what
they all felt, and Harriet knew it; even if she knew why
it had to be William, the delinquent husband and
father.
'And now that's got to be it, sister-in-law Harriet,' he
announced, leaning forward from his wall, hand
raised, like a band-leader. 'How old are you? No, don't
tell me, I know, and you've had four children in six
years . . .' Here he looked around to make sure they
33
were all with him: they were, and Harriet could see it.
She smiled ironically.
'A criminal,' she said, 'that's what I am.'
'Give it a rest, Harriet. That's all we ask of you,' he
went on, sounding more and more facetious, histrionic
-- as was his way.
'The father of four chidren speaks,' said Sarah,
passionately cuddling her poor Amy, defying them to
say aloud what they must be thinking: that she was
going out of her way to support him, her unsatisfactory
husband, in front of them all. He gave her a grateful
look while his eyes avoided the pathetic bundle she
protected.
'Yes, but at least we spread it out over ten years,' he
said.
'We are going to give it a rest,' announced Harriet.
She added, sounding defiant, 'For at least three years.'
Everyone exchanged looks: she thought them
condemning.
'I told you so,' said William. 'These madmen are
going to go on.'
'These madmen certainly are,' said David.
'I told you so,' said Dorothy. 'When Harriet's got an
idea into her head, then you can save your breath.'
'Just like her mother,' said Sarah forlornly: this
referred to Dorothy's decision that Harriet needed her
more than Sarah did, the defective child notwithstanding. 'You're much tougher than she is, Sarah,' Dorothy
had pronounced. 'The trouble with Harriet is that her
eyes have always been bigger than her stomach.'
Dorothy was near Harriet, with little Jane, listless
from the bad night, dozing in her arms. She sat erect,
solid; her lips were set firm, her eyes missed nothing.
34
'Why not?' said Harriet. She smiled at her mother:
'How could I do better?'
'They are going to have four more children,' Dorothy
said, appealing to the others.
'Good God,' said James, admiring but awed. 'Well,
it's just as well I make so much money.'
David did not like this: he flushed and would not
look at anyone.
'Oh don't be like that, David,' said Sarah, trying not
to sound bitter: she needed money, badly, but it was
David, who was in a good job, who got so much extra.
'You aren't really going to have four more children?'
enquired Sarah, sighing - and they all knew she was
saying, four more challenges to destiny. She gently put
her hand over the sleeping Amy's head, covered in a
shawl, holding it safe from the world.
'Yes, we are,' said David.
'Yes, we certainly are,' said Harriet. 'This is what
everyone wants, really, but we've been brainwashed
out of it. People want to live like this, really.'
'Happy families,' said Molly critically: she was
standing up for a life where domesticity was kept in its
place, a background to what was important.
'We are the centre of this family,' said David. 'We
are - Harriet and me. Not you, Mother.'
'God forbid,' said Molly, her large face, always
highly coloured, even more flushed: she was annoyed.
'Oh all right,' said her son. 'It's never been your
style.'
'It's certainly never been mine,' said James, 'and I'm
not going to apologize for it.'
'But you've been a marvellous father, super,' chirruped Deborah. 'And Jessica's been a super mum.'
35
Her real mother raised her ponderous brows.
'I don't seem to remember your ever giving Molly
much of a chance,' said Frederick.
'But it's so co-o-o-ld in England,' moaned Deborah.
James, in his bright, overbright clothes, a handsome
well-preserved gent dressed for a southern summer,
allowed himself the ironical snort of the oldster at
youthful tactlessness, and his look at his wife and her
husband apologized for Deborah. 'And anyway,' he
insisted, 'it isn't my style. You're quite wrong, Harriet.
The opposite is true. People are brainwashed into
believing family life is the best. But that's the past.'
'If you don't like it, then why are you here?'
demanded Harriet, much too belligerently for this
pleasant morning scene. Then she blushed and
exclaimed, 'No, I didn't mean that!'
'No, of course you don't mean it,' said Dorothy.
'You're overtired.'
'We are here because it's lovely,' said a schoolgirl
cousin of David's. She had an unhappy, or at least
complicated, family background, and she had taken to
spending her holidays here, her parents pleased she
was having a taste of real family life. Her name was
Bridget.
David and Harriet were exchanging long supportive
humorous looks, as they often did, and had not heard
the schoolgirl, who was now sending them pathetic
glances.
'Come on, you two,' said William, 'tell Bridget she's
welcome.'
'What? What's the matter?' demanded Harriet.
William said, 'Bridget has to be told by you that she
is welcome. Well - we all do, from time to time,' he
36
added, in his facetious way, and could not help sending a look at his wife.
'Well, naturally you are welcome, Bridget,' said
David. He sent a glance to Harriet, who said at once.
'But of course.' She meant, That goes without saying;
and the weight of a thousand marital discussions was
behind it, causing Bridget to look from David to Harriet
and back, and then around the whole family, saying,
'When I get married, this is what I am going to do. I'm
going to be like Harriet and David, and have a big
house and a lot of children
. . . and you'll all be
welcome.' She was fifteen, a plain dark plump girl who
they all knew would shortly blossom and become
beautiful. They told her so.
'It's natural,' said Dorothy tranquilly. 'You haven't
any sort of a home really, so you value it.'
'Something wrong with that logic,' said Molly.
The schoolgirl looked around the table, at a loss.
'My mother means that you can only value something if you've experienced it,' said David. 'But I am
the living proof that isn't so.'
'If you're saying you didn't have a proper home,'
said Molly, 'that's just nonsense.'
'You had two,' said James.
'I had my room,' said David. 'My room - that was
home.'
'Well, I suppoe we must be grateful for that concession. I was not aware you felt deprived,' said Frederick.
'I didn't, ever - I had my room.'
They decided to shrug, and laugh.
'And you haven't even thought about the problems
of educating them all,' said Molly. 'Not so far as we
can see.'
37
And now here was appearing that point of difference
that the life in this house so successfully smoothed
over. It went without saying that David had gone to
private schools.
'Luke will start at the local school this year,' said
Harriet. 'And Helen will start next year.'
'Well, if that's good enough for you,' said Molly.
'My three went to ordinary schools,' said Dorothy,
not letting this slide; but Molly did not accept the
challenge. She remarked, 'Well, unless James chips in
to help ...' thus making it clear that she and Frederick
could not or would not contribute.
James said nothing. He did not even allow himself
to look ironical.
'It's five years, six years, before we have to worry
about the next stage of education for Luke and Helen,'
said Harriet, again sounding over-irritable.
Insisted Molly: 'We put David down for his schools
when he was born. And Deborah, too.'
'Well,' said Deborah, 'why am I any better for my
posh schools than Harriet - or anyone else?'
'It's a point,' said James, who had paid for the posh
schools.
'Not much of a point,' said Molly.
William sighed, clowning it: 'Deprived all the rest of
us are. Poor William. Poor Sarah. Poor Bridget. Poor
Harriet. Tell me, Molly, if I had been to posh schools
would I get a decent job now?'
'That isn't the point,' said Molly.
'She means you'd be happier unemployed or in a
i f lthy job well educated than badly educated,' said
Sarah.
'I'm sorry,' said Molly. 'Public education is awful.
38
It's getting worse. Harriet and David have got four
children to educate. With more to come, apparently.
How do you know James will be able to help you?
Anything can happen in the world.'
'Anything does, all the time,' said William bitterly, but
laughed to soften it.
Harriet moved distressfully in her chair, took Paul
off her breast with a skill at concealing herself they all
noted and admired, and said, 'I don't want to have this
conversation. It's a lovely morning. . .'
'I'll help you, of course, within limits,' said James.
'Oh, James ...' said Harriet, 'thank you . . . thank
you... . Oh dear ... why don't we go up to the woods?
. . . We could take a picnic lunch.'
The morning had slid past. It was midday. Sun
struck the edges of the jolly red curtains, making them
an intense orange, sending orange lozenges to glow on
the table among cups, saucers, a bowl of fruit. The
children had come down from the top of the house and
were in the garden. The adults went to watch them
from the windows. The garden continued neglected;
there was never time for it. The lawn was patchily
lush, and toys lay about. Birds sang in the shrubs,
ignoring the children. Little Jane, set down by Dorothy,
staggered out to join the others. A group of children
played noisily together, but she was too young, and
strayed in and out of the game, in the private world of
a two-year-old. They skilfully accommodated their
game to her. The week before, Easter Sunday, this
garden had had painted eggs hidden everywhere in it.
A wonderful day, the children bringing in magical eggs
from everywhere that Harriet and Dorothy and Bridget,
the schoolgirl, had sat up half the night to decorate.
39
Harriet and David were together at the window, the
baby in her arms. He put his arm around her. They
exchanged a quick look, half guilty because of the
irrepressible smiles on their faces, which they felt were
probably going to exasperate the others.
'You two are incorrigible,' said William. 'They are
hopeless,' he said to the others. 'Well, who's complaining? I'm not! Why don't we all go for that picnic?'
The house party filled five cars, children wedged in
or on the adults' laps.
Summer was the same: two months of it, and again
the family came and went, and came again. The schoolgirl was there all the time, poor Bridget, clinging fast
to this miracle of a family. Rather, in fact, as Harriet
and David did. Both more than once - seeing the girl's
face, reverential, even awed, always on the watch as if
she feared to miss some revelation of goodness or grace
the moment she allowed her attention to lapse - saw
themselves. Even uneasily saw themselves. It was too
much ... excessive ... Surely they should be saying to
her, 'Look here, Bridget, don't expect so much. Life
isn't like that!' But life is like that, if you choose right:
so why should they feel she couldn't have what they
had so plentifully?
Even before the crowd gathered before the Christmas
of 1973, Harriet was pregnant again. To her utter
dismay, and David's. How could it have happened?
They had been careful, particularly so because of their
determination not to have any more children for a
while. David tried to joke, 'It's this room, I swear it's a
baby-maker!'
They had put off telling Dorothy. She was not there,
anyway, because Sarah had said it was unfair that
40
Harriet got all the help. Harriet simply could not
manage. One after another, three girls came to help;
they had just left school and could not easily find
work. They were not much good. Harriet believed she
looked after them more than they her. They came or
didn't come as the mood took them, and would sit
around drinking tea with their girl-friends while Harriet toiled. She was frantic, exhausted . . . she was
peevish; she lost her temper; she burst into tears ...
David saw her sitting at the kitchen table, head in her
hands, muttering that this new foetus was poisoning
her: Paul lay whimpering in his pram, ignored. David
took a fortnight's leave from his office to come home
and help. They had known how much they owed
Dorothy, but now knew it better - and that when she
heard Harriet was pregnant again she would be angry.
Very. And she would be right.
'It will all be easier when Christmas starts,' wept
Harriet.
'You can't be serious,' said David, furious. 'Of course
they can't come this Christmas.'
'But it is so easy when people are here, everyone
helps me.'
'Just for once we'll go to one of them,' said David,
but this idea did not live for more than five minutes:
none of the other households could accomodate six
extra people.
Harriet lay weeping on her bed. 'But they must come,
don't put them off - oh, David, please ... at least it'll
keep my mind off it.'
He sat on his side of the bed watching her, uneasy,
critical, trying not to be. Actually he would be pleased
not to have the house full of people for three weeks, a
41
month: it cost so much, and they were always short of
money. He had taken on extra work, and here he was
at home, a nursemaid.
'You simply have to get someone in to help, Harriet.
You must try and keep one of them.'
She burst out in indignation at the criticism. 'That's
not fair! You aren't here stuck with them - they aren't
any good. I don't believe any of these girls have done
an hour's work in their lives.'
'They've been some help - even if it's only the
washing-up.'
Dorothy telephoned to say that both Sarah and
Harriet were going to have to manage: she, Dorothy,
needed a break. She was going home to her flat to
please herself for a few weeks. Harriet was weeping,
hardly able to speak. Dorothy could not get out of her
what could possibly be wrong: she said, 'Very well, I
suppose I'll have to come, then.'
She sat at the big table with David, Harriet, the four
children there, too, and looked severely at Harriet. She
had understood her daughter was pregnant again
within half an hour of arriving. They could see from
her set angry face that she had terrible things to say.
'I'm your servant, I do the work of a servant in this
house.' Or, 'You are very selfish, both of you. You are
irresponsible.' These words were in the air but were
not spoken: they knew that if she allowed herself to
begin she would not stop with this.
She sat at the head of the table - the position near
the stove - stirring her tea, with one eye on baby Paul,
who was fretful in his little chair and wanted to be
cuddled. Dorothy, too, looked tired, and her grey hair
was disordered: she had been going up to her room to
42
tidy herself when she had been swallowed in embraces
with Luke and Helen and Jane, who had missed her
and knew that the crossness and impatience that had
ruled the house would now be banished.
'You know that everyone is expecting to come here
for Christmas,' she demanded heavily, not looking at
them.
'Oh yes, yes, yes,' clamoured Luke and Helen,
making a song and dance of it and rushing around the
kitchen. 'Oh yes, when are they coming? Is Tony
coming? Is Robin coming? Is Anne coming?'
'Sit down,' said David, sharp and cold, and they
gave him astonished, hurt looks and sat.
'It's crazy,' said Dorothy. She was flushed with the
hot tea and with all the things she was forcing herself
not to say.
'Of course everyone has to come,' Harriet said, weeping - and ran out of the room.
'It's very important to her,' said David apologetically.
'And not to you?' This was sarcastic.
'The thing is, I don't think Harriet is anywhere near
herself,' said David, and held his eyes on Dorothy's, to
make her face him. But she would not.
'What does that mean, my mother isn't near herself?'
enquired Luke, the six-year-old, ready to make a word
game of it. Even, perhaps, a riddle. But he was perturbed. David put out his arm and Luke went to his
father, stood close, looked up into his face.
'It's all right, Luke,' said David.
'You've got to get someone in to help,' said Dorothy.
'We have tried.' David explained what had happened
with the three amiable and indifferent girls.
'Doesn't surprise me. Who wants to do an honest job
43
these days?' said Dorothy. 'But you have to get someone. And I can tell you I didn't expect to end my days
as your and Sarah's skivvy.'
Here Luke and Helen gave their grandmother
incredulous looks and burst into tears. After a pause,
Dorothy controlled herself and began consoling them.
'All right, it's all right,' she said. 'And now I'm going
to put Paul and Jane to bed. You two, Luke and Helen,
can put yourselves to bed. I'll come up and say good
night. And then your gran is off to bed. I'm tired.'
The subdued children went off upstairs.
Harriet did not come down again that evening; her
husband and her mother knew she was being sick.
Which they were used to ... but were not used to ill
temper, tears, fretfulness.
When the children were in bed, David did some of
the work he had brought home, made himself a sandwich, and was joined by Dorothy, who had come down
to make herself tea. This time they did not exchange
irritabilites: they were together in a companionable
silence, like two old campaigners facing trials and
difficulties.
Then David went up into the great shadowy bedroom, where lights from an upstairs window in a
neighbouring house a good thirty yards away sent
gleams and shadows on to the ceiling. He stood looking
at the big bed where Harriet lay. Asleep? Baby Paul
was lying asleep close to her, unwrapped. David cautiously leaned over, folded Paul into his cuddling
blanket, took him to his room next door. He saw
Harriet's eyes shine as she followed his movements.
He got into bed and, as always, slid out his arm so
44
that she could put her head on to it and be gathered
close to him.
But she said, 'Feel this,' and guided his hand to her
stomach.
She was nearly three months pregnant.
This new baby had not yet shown signs of independent life, but now David felt a jolt under his hand,
quite a hard movement.
'Can you be further along that you thought?' Once
more he felt the thrust, and could not believe it.
Harriet was weeping again, and he felt, knowing of
course this was unfair, that she was breaking the rules of
some contract between them: tears and misery had not
ever been on their agenda!
She felt rejected by him. They had always loved to
lie here feeling a new life, greeting it. She had waited
four times for the first little flutters, easily mistaken
but then certain; the sensation that was as if a fish
mouthed out a bubble; the small responses to her
movements, her touch, and even - she was convinced
- her thoughts.
This morning, lying in the dark before the children
woke, she had felt a tapping in her belly, demanding
attention. Disbelieving, she had half sat up, looking
down at her still flat, if soft, stomach, and felt the
imperative beat, like a small drum. She had been
keeping herself on the move all day, so as not to feel
these demands from the new being, unlike anything
she had known before.
'You had better go and get Dr Brett to check the
dates,' said David.
Harriet said nothing, feeling it was beside the point:
she did not know why she felt this.
45
But she did go to Dr Brett.
He said, 'Well, perhaps I was out by a month - but if
so, you have really been very careless, Harriet.'
This scolding was what she was getting from everyone, and she flashed out, 'Anyone can make a mistake.'
He frowned as he felt the emphatic movements in
her stomach, and remarked, 'Well, there's nothing very
much wrong with that, is there?' He looked dubious,
however. He was a harassed, no longer young man,
who, she had heard, had a difficult marriage. She had
always felt rather superior to him. Now she felt at his
mercy, and was looking up into that professionally
reticent face as she lay there, under his hands, longing
for him to say something else. What? An explanation.
'You'll have to take it easy,' he said, turning away.
Behind his back, she muttered, 'Take is easy yourself!' and chided herself, You bad-tempered cow.
Everyone arriving for Christmas was told Harriet was
pregnant - it was a mistake - but now they were
pleased, really. . . . But 'Speak for yourselves,' said
Dorothy. People had to rally around, even more than
they always did. Harriet was not to cook, do housework, do anything. She must be waited upon.
Each new person looked startled on hearing this
news, then made jokes. Harriet and David came into
rooms full of family, talking, who fell silent knowing
they were there. They had been exchanging condemnations. Dorothy's role in keeping this household going
was being given full credit. The pressure on David's
salary - not, after all, a large one - was mentioned.
Jokes were made about James's probable reception of
the news. Then the teasing began. David and Harriet
were commended for their fertility, and jokes were
46
made about the influences of their bedroom. They
responded to the jokes with relief. But all this jesting
had an edge on it, and people were looking at the
young Lovatts differently from the way they had done
before. The quietly insistent patient quality that had
brought them together, that had caused this house to
come into being and had summoned all these unlikely
people from various parts of England, and the world,
too - James was coming from Bermuda, Deborah from
the States, and even Jessica had promised to put in a
brief appearance - this quality, whatever it was, this
demand on life, which had been met in the past with
respect (grudging or generous), was now showing its
reverse side, in Harriet lying pale and unsociable on
her bed, and then coming down determined to be one
of the party but failing, and going upstairs again; in
Dorothy's grim patience, for she worked from dawn to
dusk and often in the night, too; and in the children's
querulousness and demands for attention - particularly little Paul's.
Another girl came in from the village, found by Dr
Brett. She was, like the other three, pleasant, lazy,
seeing nothing to be done unless her attention was
directed to it, affronted by the amount of work needed
by four children. She did, however, enjoy the people
sitting around and talking, the sociable atmosphere,
and in no time she was sharing meals and sitting
around with them; she found it quite in order to be
waited on by them. Everyone knew that she would find
an excuse to leave when this delightful house party
broke up.
Which it did, rather earlier than usual. It was not
only Jessica (in her bright summer clothes that made
47
no concession to the English winter except for a slight
cardigan) who remembered people elsewhere who had
been promised visits. Jessica took herself off, and
Deborah with her. James followed. Frederick had to
i f nish a book. The enraptured schoolgirl, Bridget,
found Harriet lying down, her hands pressed into her
stomach, tears running down her face, moaning from
some pain she would not specify - and was so shocked
she, too, wept and said she had always known it was
too good to last, and went off back home to her mother,
who had just remarried and did not really want her.
The girl who had come to help went home, and
David looked for a trained nanny in London. He could
not afford one, but James had said he would pay for it.
Until Harriet was better, he said: uncharacteristically
grumpy, he was making it clear he thought that Harriet
had chosen this life and now should not expect everyone to foot the bill.
But they could not find a nanny: the nannies all
wanted to go abroad with families who had a baby, or
perhaps two; or to be in London. This small town, and
the four children, with another coming, put them off.
Instead, Alice, a cousin of Frederick's, a widow
down on her luck, came to help Dorothy. Alice was
quick, fussy, nervous, like a little grey terrier. She had
three grown-up children, and grandchildren, but said
she did not want to be a nuisance to them, a remark
that caused Dorothy to make dry remarks, which Harnet felt like accusations. Dorothy was not pleased to
have a woman of her own age sharing authority, but it
could not be helped. Harriet seemed unable to do
anything much.
She went back to Dr Brett, for she could not sleep or
48
rest because of the energy of the foetus, which seemed
to be trying to tear its way out of her stomach.
'Just look at that,' she said as her stomach heaved
up, convulsed, subsided. 'Five months.'
He made the usual tests, and said, 'It's large for five
months, but not abnormally so.'
'Have you ever had a case like this before?' Harriet
sounded sharp, peremptory, and the doctor gave her an
annoyed look.
'I've certainly seen energetic babies before,' he said
shortly, and when she demanded, 'At five months?
Like this?' he refused to meet her - was dishonest, as
she felt it. 'I'll give you a sedative,' he said. For her.
But she thought of it as something to quiet the baby.
Now, afraid of asking Dr Brett, she begged tranquillizers from friends, and from her sisters. She did not
tell David how many she was taking, and this was the
i f rst time she had hidden anything from him. The
foetus was quiet for about an hour after she dosed
herself, and she was given a respite from the ceaseless
battering and striving. It was so bad that she would cry
out in pain. At night, David heard her moan, or
whimper, but now he did not offer comfort, for it
seemed that these days she did not find his arms
around her any help.
'My God,' she said, or grunted, or groaned, and then
suddenly sat up, or scrambled out of bed and went
doubled up out of the room, fast, escaping from the
pain.
He had stopped putting his hand on her stomach, in
the old companionable way, for what he felt there was
beyond what he could manage with. It was not possible
that such a tiny creature could be showing such fearful
49
i
strength; and yet it did. And nothing he said seemed
to reach Harriet, who, he felt, was possessed, had gone
right away from him, in this battle with the foetus,
which he could not share.
He might wake to watch her pacing the room in the
dark, hour after hour. When she at last lay down,
regulating her breathing, she would start up again,
with an exclamation, and, knowing he was awake,
would go downstairs to the big family room where she
could stride up and down, groaning, swearing, weeping, without being observed.
As the Easter holiday approached and the two older
women made remarks about getting the house ready,
Harriet said, 'They can't come. They can't possibly
come.'
'They'll expect it,' said Dorothy.
'We can manage,' said Alice.
'No,' said Harriet.
Wails and protests from the children, and Harriet
did not soften. This made Dorothy even more disapproving. Here she was, with Alice, two capable
women, doing all the work, and the least Harriet could
do...
'You're sure you don't want them to come?' asked
David, who had been begged by the children to make
her change her mind.
'Oh, do what you like,' Harriet said.
But when Easter came, Harriet was proved right: it
was not a success. Her strained, abstracted face as she
sat there at her table, stiffly upright, braced for the next
jolt, or jab, stopped conversation, spoiled the fun, the
good times. 'What have you got in there?' asked William, jocular but uneasy, seeing Harriet's stomach
convulse. 'A wrestler?'
50
'God only knows,' said Harriet, and she was bitter,
not joking. 'How am I going to get through to July?' she
demanded, in a low appalled voice. 'I can't! I simply
can't do it!'
They all - David, too - judged that she was simply
exhausted because this baby was coming too soon. She
must be humoured. Alone in her ordeal - and she had to
be, she knew that, and did not blame her family for not
accepting what she was being slowly forced to accept
- she became silent, morose, suspicious of them all and
their thoughts about her. The only thing that helped
was to keep moving.
If a dose of some sedative kept the enemy - so she
now thought of this savage thing inside her - quiet for
an hour, then she made the most of the time, and slept,
grabbing sleep to her, holding it, drinking it, before she
leaped out of bed as it woke with a heave and a stretch
that made her feel sick. She would clean the kitchen,
the living-room, the stairs, wash windows, scrub cupboards, her whole body energetically denying the pain.
She insisted that her mother and Alice let her work,
and when they said there was no need to scrub the
kitchen again, she said, 'For the kitchen no, for me
yes.' By breakfast time she might have already worked
for three or four hours, and looked hag-ridden. She
took David to the station, and the two older children
to school, then parked the car somewhere and walked.
She almost ran through streets she hardly saw, hour
after hour, until she understood she was causing comment. Then she took to driving a short way out of the
town, where she walked along the country lanes, fast,
sometimes running. People in passing cars would turn,
51
amazed, to see this hurrying driven woman, whitefaced, hair flying, open-mouthed, panting, arms
clenched across her front. If they stopped to offer help,
she shook her head and ran on.
Time passed. It did pass, though she was held in an
order of time different from those around her - and not
the pregnant woman's time either, which is slow, a
calendar of the growth of the hidden being. Her time
was endurance, containing pain. Phantoms and chimeras inhabited her brain. She would think, When the
scientists make experiments, welding two kinds of
animal together, of different sizes, then I suppose this
is what the poor mother feels. She imagined pathetic
botched creatures, horribly real to her, the products of
a Great Dane or a borzoi with a little spaniel; a lion
and a dog; a great cart horse and a little donkey; a tiger
and a goat. Sometimes she believed hooves were cutting her tender inside flesh, sometimes claws.
In the afternoon, she collected the children from
school, and, later, David from the station. She walked
around the kitchen as suppers were eaten, encouraged
the children to watch television, and then went up to
the third floor where she hastened up and down the
corridor.
The family could hear her swift heavy steps, up
there, and did not let their eyes meet.
Time passed. It did pass. The seventh month was
better, and this was because of the amount of drugs she
took. Appalled at the distance that had grown up
between her and her husband, between her and the
children, her mother, Alice, she now planned her day
for one thing: that she would seem to be normal
between the hours of four, when Helen and Luke ended
school, until eight or nine, when they went to bed. The
drugs did not seem to be affecting her much: she was
willing them to leave her alone and to reach the baby,
the foetus - this creature with whom she was locked in
a struggle to survive. And for those hours it was
quiet, or if it showed signs of coming awake, and
i f ghting her, she took another dose.
Oh how eager everyone was to welcome her back
into the family, normal, herself: they ignored, because
she wanted them to, her tenseness, her tiredness.
David would put his arms around her and say, 'Oh,
Harriet, you are all right?'
Two months to go.
`Yes, yes, I am. Really.' And she silently addressed the
being crouching in her womb: `Now you shut up or I'll
take another pill.' It seemed to her that it listened and
understood.
A scene in the kitchen: family supper. Harriet and
David commanded the head and foot of the table. Luke
and Helen sat together on one side. Alice held little
Paul, who could never get enough cuddling: he got so
little from his mother. Jane sat near Dorothy's place,
who was at the stove, ladle in her hand. Harriet looked
at her mother, a large healthy woman in her fifties,
with her bush of iron-grey curls, and her pink fresh
face, and her large blue eyes 'like lollipops' - a family
joke - and thought, I'm as strong as she is. I'll survive.
And she smiled at Alice, thin, wiry, tough, energetic,
and thought again, These elderly women, look at them,
they've survived everything.
Dorothy was filling their plates with vegetable soup.
She sat down, at leisure, with her own plate. Bread
was passed around, a big basket of it.
52
53
A
Happiness had returned and sat at the table with
them - and Harriet's hand, unseen below the level of
the table-top, was held over the enemy: You be quiet.
'A story,' said Luke. 'A story, Daddy.'
On days when there was school tomorrow, the children had supper early and went up to bed. But on
Fridays and Saturdays they ate with the grown-ups
and a story was told during the meal.
Here, enclosed in the hospitable kitchen, it was
warm and steamy with the smell of soup. Outside was
a blustering night. May. The curtains were not drawn.
A branch stretched across the window: a spring
branch, full of pristine blossom, pale in the twilight,
but the air that beat on the panes had been blasted
down south from some iceberg or snow-field. Harriet
was spooning in soup, and broke hunks of bread into
it. Her appetite was enormous, insatiable - so bad she
was ashamed and raided the fridge when no one could
see her. She would interrupt her nocturnal peregrinations to stuff into herself anything she could find to
eat. She even had secret caches like an alcoholic's
hoards, only it was food: chocolate, bread, pies.
David began, 'Two children, a boy and a girl, set off
one day to have an adventure in the forest. They went a
long way into the forest. It was hot outside, but under the
trees it was cool. They saw a deer lying down,
resting. Birds flitted about and sang to them.'
David stopped to eat soup. Helen and Luke sat with
their eyes on his face, motionless. Jane listened, too,
but differently. Four years old: she looked to see how
they took in the story, and copied them, fixing her eyes
on her father.
'Do the birds sing to us?' enquired Luke doubtfully,
54
frowning. He had a strong, severe face; and, as always,
he demanded the truth. 'When we are in the garden
and the birds sing, are they singing to us?'
'Of course not, silly,' said Helen. 'It was a magic
forest.'
'Of course they sing to you,' said Dorothy firmly.
The children, first hunger appeased, sat with their
spoons in their hands, wide eyes on their father.
Harriet's heart oppressed her: it was their open trustfulness, their helplessness. The television was on: a
professionally cool voice was telling about some murders in a London suburb. She lumbered over to turn it
off, plodded back, served herself more soup, piled in
the bread ... She listened to David's voice, tonight the
storyteller's voice, so often heard in the kitchen, hers,
Dorothy's 'When the children got hungry, they found a bush
covered with chocolate sweets. Then they found a pool
made of orange juice. They were sleepy. They lay
under a bush near the friendly deer. When they woke up,
they said thank you to the deer and went on.
`Suddenly the little girl found she was alone. She
and her brother had lost each other. She wanted to go
home. She did not know which way to walk. She was
looking for another friendly deer, or a sparrow, or any
bird, to tell her where she was and show her the way
out of the forest. She wandered about for a long time,
and then she was thirsty again. She bent over a pool
wondering if it would be orange juice, but it was water,
clear pure forest water, and it tasted of plants and
stones. She drank, from her hands.' Here the two older
children reached for their glasses and drank. Jane
interlaced her fingers to form a cup.
55
`She sat there by the pool. Soon it would be dark.
She bent over the pool to see if there was a fish who
could tell her the way out of the forest, but she saw
something she didn't expect. It was a girl's face, and
she was looking straight up at her. It was a face she
had never seen in her whole life. This strange girl was
smiling, but it was a nasty smile, not friendly, and the
little girl thought this other girl was going to reach up
out of the water and pull her down into it ...'
A heavy, shocked, indrawn breath from Dorothy,
who felt this was too frightening at bedtime.
But the children sat frozen with attention. Little
Paul, grizzling on Alice's lap, earned from Helen 'Be
quiet, shut up.'
'Phyllis - that was the little girl's name - had never
seen such frightening eyes.'
`Is that Phyllis in my nursery school?' asked Jane.
'No,' said Luke.
'No,' said Helen.
David had stopped. Apparently for inspiration.
He
was frowning, had an abstracted look, as if he had a
headache. As for Harriet, she was wanting to cry out,
`Stop - stop it! You are talking about me - this is what
you are feeling about me!' She could not believe that
David did not see it.
'What happened then?' asked Luke. 'What happened
exactly?'
'Wait,' said David. `Wait, my soup . . .' He ate.
`I know what happened,' said Dorothy firmly. 'Phyllis decided to leave that nasty pool at once. She
ran
fast along a path until she bumped into her brother. He
was looking for her. They held each other's hands and
they ran out of the forest and they, ran safely home.'
56
`That was it, exactly,' said David. He was smiling
ruefully, but looked bemused.
'And that was what really really happened, Daddy?'
demanded Luke, anxious.
`Absolutely,' said David.
'Who was that girl in the pool, who was she?'
demanded Helen, looking from her father to her
mother.
'Oh just a magic girl,' said David casually. 'I have no
idea. She just materialized.'
'What's materialized?' asked Luke, saying the word
with difficulty.
'It's bedtime,' said Dorothy.
'But what is materialized?' Luke insisted.
'We haven't had any pudding!' cried Jane.
'There's no pudding, there's fruit,' said Dorothy.
'What is materialized, Daddy?' Luke anxiously
persisted.
'It is when something that wasn't there suddenly is
there.'
'But why, why is it?' wailed Helen, distressed.
Dorothy said, `Upstairs, children.'
Helen took an apple, Luke another, and Jane lifted
some bread off her mother's plate with a quick, conscious, mischievous smile. She had not been upset by
the story.
The three children went noisily up the stairs, and
baby Paul looked after them, excluded, his face puckering, ready to cry.
Alice swiftly got up with him and went after the
children, saying, `No one told me stories when I was
little!' It was hard to tell whether this was a complaint
or, `and I'm better for it.'
57
Suddenly, Luke appeared on the landing. 'Is everyone coming for the summer holidays?'
David glanced worriedly at Harriet - then away.
Dorothy looked steadily at her daughter.
'Yes,' said Harriet weakly. 'Of course.'
Luke called up the stairs, 'She said, "Of course"!'
Dorothy said, 'You will have just had this baby.'
'It's up to you and Alice,' said Harriet. 'If you feel
you can't cope, then you must say so.'
'It seems to me that I cope,' said Dorothy, dry.
'Yes, I know,' said David quickly. 'You're
marvellous.'
'And you don't know what you would have done - '
'Don't,' said David. And to Harriet: 'Much better that
we put things off, and have them all at Christmas.'
'The children will be so disappointed,' said Harriet.
This did not sound like her old insistence: it was flat
and indifferent. Her husband and her mother examined
her curiously - so Harriet felt their inspection of her,
detached, unkind. She said grimly, 'Well, perhaps this
baby will be born early. Surely it must.' She laughed
painfully, and then suddenly she got up, exclaiming, 'I
must move, I have to!' and began her dogged, painful
hour-after-hour walk back and forth, up and down.
She went to Dr Brett at eight months and asked him
to induce the baby.
He looked critically at her and said, 'I thought you
didn't believe in it.'
'I don't. But this is different.'
'Not that I can see.'
'It's because you don't want to. It's not you who is
carrying this - ' She cut off monster, afraid of
antagonizing him. 'Look,' she said, trying to sound calm, but
58
her voice was angry and accusing, 'would you say I
was an unreasonable woman? Hysterical? Difficult?
Just a pathetic hysterical woman?'
'I would say that you are utterly worn out. Bone
tired. You never did find being pregnant easy, did you?
Have you forgotten? I've had you sitting here through
four pregnancies, with all kinds of problems - all
credit to you, you put up with everything very well.'
'But it's not the same thing, it is absolutely different,
I don't understand why you can't see it. Can't you see
it?' She thrust out her stomach, which was heaving
and - as she felt it - seething as she sat there.
The doctor looked dubiously at her stomach, sighed,
and wrote her a prescription for more sedatives.
No, he couldn't see it. Rather, he wouldn't - that was
the point. Not only he, but all of them, they wouldn't
see how different this was.
And as she walked, strode, ran along the country
lanes, she fantasized that she took the big kitchen
knife, cut open her own stomach, lifted out the child and when they actually set eyes on each other, after
this long blind struggle, what would she see?
Soon, nearly a month early, the pains began. Once
she started, labour had always gone quickly. Dorothy
rang David in London, and at once took Harriet into
hospital. For the first time, Harriet had insisted on a
hospital, surprising everyone.
By the time she was there, there were strong wrenching pains, worse, she knew, than ever in the past. The
baby seemed to be fighting its way out. She was bruised she knew it; inside she must be one enormous black
bruise ... and no one would ever know.
When at last the moment came when she could be
59
given oblivion, she cried out, 'Thank God, thank God,
it's over at last!' She heard a nurse saying, 'This one's a
real little toughie, look at him.' Then a woman's
voice was saying, 'Mrs Lovatt, Mrs Lovatt, are you with
us? Come back to us! Your husband is here, dear.
You've a healthy boy.'
'A real little wrestler,' said Dr Brett. 'He came out
laugh, 'He's like a troll, or a goblin or something.' And
she cuddled him, to make up. But he was stiff and
heavy.
'Come, Harriet,' said Dr Brett, annoyed at her. And
she thought, I've been through this with Dr bloody
Brett four times and it's always been marvellous, and
now he's like a schoolmaster.
i f ghting the whole world.'
She raised herself with difficulty, because the lower
half of her body was too sore to move. The baby was
put into her arms. Eleven pounds of him. The others
had not been more than seven pounds. He was muscular, yellowish, long. It seemed as if he were trying to
stand up, pushing his feet into her side.
'He's a funny little chap,' said David, and he
sounded dismayed.
He was not a pretty baby. He did not look like a baby
at all. He had a heavy-shouldered hunched look, as if
he were crouching there as he lay. His forehead sloped
from his eyes to his crown. His hair grew in an unusual
pattern from the double crown where started a wedge
or triangle that came low on the forehead, the hair
lying forward in a thick yellowish stubble, while the
side and back hair grew downwards. His hands were
thick and heavy, with pads of muscle in the palms. He
opened his eyes and looked straight up into his mother's face. They were focused greeny-yellow eyes, like
lumps of soapstone. She had been waiting to exchange
looks with the creature who, she had been sure, had
been trying to hurt her, but there was no recognition
there. And her heart contracted with pity for him: poor
little beast, his mother disliking him so much ... But
she heard herself say nervously, though she tried to
She bared her breast and offered the child her nipple.
The nurses, the doctor, her mother, and her husband
stood watching, with the smiles that this moment
imposed. But there was none of the atmosphere of
festival, of achievement, no champagne; on the contrary, there was a strain in everyone, apprehension. A
strong, sucking reflex, and then hard gums clamped
down on her nipple, and she winced. The child looked at
her and bit, hard.
' Well,' said Harriet, trying to laugh, removing him.
'Try him a little more,' said the nurse.
He was not crying. Harriet held him out, challenging
the nurse with her eyes to take him. The nurse, mouth
tight with disapproval, took the baby, and he was put
unprotesting in his cot. He had not cried since he was
born, except for a first roar of protest, or perhaps
surprise.
The four children were brought in to see their new
brother in the hospital ward. The two other women
who shared the room with her had got out of bed and
taken their babies to a day-room. Harriet had refused
to get out of bed. She told the doctors and nurses she
needed time for her internal bruises to heal; she said
this almost defiantly, carelessly, indifferent to their
critical looks.
David stood at the end of the bed, holding baby Paul.
60
61
A,
M&
Harriet yearned for this baby, this little child, from
whom she had been separated so soon. She loved the
look of him, the comical soft little face, with soft blue
eyes - like bluebells, she thought - and his soft little
limbs ... it was as if she were sliding her hands along
them, and then enclosing his feet in her palms. A real
baby, a real little child ...
The three older children stared down at the newcomer who was so different from them all: of a different
substance, so it seemed to Harriet. Partly this was
because she was still responding to the look of him
with her memories of his difference in the womb, but
partly it was because of his heavy, sallow lumpishness.
And then there was this strange head of his, sloping
back from the eyebrow ridges.
'We are going to call him Ben,' said Harriet.
'Are we?' said David.
'Yes, it suits him.'
Luke on one side, Helen on the other, took Ben's
small hands, and said, 'Hello, Ben.' 'Hello, Ben.' But
the baby did not look at them.
Jane, the four-year-old, took one of his feet in her
hand, then in her two hands, but he vigorously kicked
her away.
Harriet found herself thinking, I wonder what the
mother would look like, the one who would welcome
this - alien.
She stayed in bed a week - that is, until she felt she
could manage the struggle ahead - and then went
home with her new child.
That night, in the connubial bedroom, she sat up
against a stack of pillows, nursing the baby. David was
watching.
62
Ben sucked so strongly that he emptied the first
breast in less than a minute. Always, when a breast
was nearly empty, he ground his gums together, and
so she had to snatch him away before he could begin.
It looked as if she were unkindly depriving him of the
breast, and she heard David's breathing change. Ben
roared with rage, fastened like a leech to the other
nipple, and sucked so hard she felt that her whole
breast was disappearing down his throat. This time,
she left him on the nipple until he ground his gums
hard together and she cried out, pulling him away.
'He's extraordinary,' said David, giving her the support she needed.
'Yes, he is, he's absolutely not ordinary.'
'But he's all right, he's just ...'
'A normal healthy fine baby,' said Harriet, bitter,
quoting the hospital.
David was silent: it was this anger, this bitterness in
her that he could not handle.
She was holding Ben up in the air. He was wrestling,
i f ghting, struggling, crying in his characteristic way,
which was a roar or a bellow, while he went yellowish
white with anger - not red, like a normal cross baby.
When she held him to get up the wind, he seemed to
be standing in her arms, and she felt weak with fear at
the thought that this strength had so recently been
inside her, and she at its mercy. For months, he had
been fighting to get out, just as now he fought in her
grasp to become independent.
When she laid him in his cot, which she was always
glad to do because her arms ached so badly, he bellowed out his rage, but soon lay quiet, not sleeping,
fully alert, his eyes focused, and his whole body flexing
63
and unflexing with a strong pushing movement of
heels and head she was familiar with: it was what had
made her feel she was being torn apart when he was
inside her.
She went back into bed beside David. He put out his
arm, so that she could lie by him, inside it, but she felt
treacherous and untruthful, for he would not have
liked what she was thinking.
Soon she was exhausted with feeding Ben. Not that
he did not thrive: he did. He was two pounds over his
birth weight when he was a month, which was when
he would have been less than a week old if he had
gone full term.
Her breasts were painful. Making more milk than
they ever had had to do, her chest swelled into two
bursting white globes long before the next feed was
due. But Ben was already roaring for it, and she fed
him, and he drained every drop in two or three
minutes. She felt the milk being dragged in streams
from her. Now he had begun something new: he had
taken to interrupting the fierce sucking several times
during a feed, and bringing his gums together in the
hard grinding movement that made her cry out in pain.
His small cold eyes seemed to her malevolent.
'I'm going to put him on the bottle,' she said to
Dorothy, who was watching this battle with the look,
it seemed to Harriet, everyone had when watching Ben.
She was absolutely still and intent, fascinated, almost
hypnotized, but there was repugnance there, too. And
fear?
Harriet had expected her mother to protest with 'But
he's only five weeks old!' - but what Dorothy said was
'Yes, you must, or you'll be ill.' A little later, watching
Ben roar, and twist and fight, she remarked. 'They'll
all be coming soon for the summer.' She spoke in a
way new to her, as if listening to what she said and
afraid of what she might say. Harriet recognized it, for
this was how she felt saying anything at all. So do
people speak whose thoughts are running along
secretly in channels they would rather other people
did not know about.
On that same day, Dorothy came into the bedroom
where Harriet fed Ben, and saw Harriet pulling the
child clear of breasts that had bruises all around the
nipples. She said, 'Do it. Do it now. I've bought the
bottles, and the milk. I'm sterilizing the bottles now.'
'Yes, wean him,' said David, agreeing at once. But
she had fed the other four for months, and there had
been hardly a bottle in the house.
The adults, Harriet and David, Dorothy and Alice,
were around the big table, the children having gone up
to bed, and Harriet tried Ben with the bottle. He
emptied it in a moment, while his body clenched and
unclenched, his knees up in his stomach, then
extended like a spring. He roared at the empty bottle.
'Give him another,' sad Dorothy, and set about preparing one.
'What an appetite,' said Alice socially, trying hard,
but she looked frightened.
Ben emptied the second bottle: he was supporting it
with his two fists, by himself. Harriet barely needed to
touch it.
'Neanderthal baby,' said Harriet.
'Oh come on, poor little chap,' said David, uneasy.
'Oh God, David,' said Harriet, 'poor Harriet is
more
like it.'
64
65
a
'All right, all right - the genes have come up with
something special this time.'
'But what, that's the point,' said Harriet. 'What is
he?'
The other three said nothing - or, rather, said by
their silence that they would rather not face the implications of it.
'All right,' said Harriet, 'let's say he has a healthy
appetite, if that makes everyone happy.'
Dorothy took the fighting creature from Harriet, who
collapsed exhausted back in her chair. Dorothy's face
changed as she felt the clumsy weight of the child, the
intransigence, and she shifted her position so that
Ben's pistoning legs could not reach her.
Soon Ben was taking in twice the amount of food
recommended for his age, or stage: ten or more bottles
a day.
He got a milk infection, and Harriet took him to Dr
Brett.
'A breast-fed baby shouldn't get infections,' he said.
'He's not breast-fed.'
'That's not like you, Harriet! How old is he?'
'Two months,' said Harriet. She opened her dress
and showed her breasts, still making milk, as if they
responded to Ben's never appeased appetite. They
were bruised black all around the nipples.
Dr Brett looked at the poor breasts in silence, and
Harriet looked at him: his decent, concerned doctor's
face confronting a problem beyond him.
'Naughty baby,' he conceded, and Harriet laughed
out loud in astonishment.
Dr Brett reddened, met her eyes briefly in acknowledgement of her reproach, and then looked away.
66
'All I need is a prescription for diarrhoea,' said
Harriet. She added deliberately, staring at him, willing
him to look at her, 'After all, I don't want to kill the
nasty little brute.'
Ile sighed, took off his glasses, and rubbed them
slowly. He was frowning, but not in disapproval of
her. He said, 'It is not abnormal to take a dislike to a
child. I see it all the time. Unfortunately.'
Harriet-said nothing, but she was smiling unpleasantly, and knew it.
'Let me have a look at him.'
Harriet took Ben out of the pram, and laid him on
the table. At once he turned on to his stomach and
tried to get himself on all fours. He actually succeeded for
a moment before collapsing.
She looked steadily at Dr Brett, but he turned away to
his desk to write a prescription.
'There's obviously nothing much wrong with him,' he
said, with the same baffled, offending note that Ben did
bring out of people.
'Have you ever seen a two-month baby do that?' she
insisted.
'No. I must admit I haven't. Well, let me know how
you get on.'
The news had flown around the family that the new
baby was successfully born, and everything was all
right. Meaning that Harriet was. A lot of people wrote
and rang, saying they were looking forward to the
summer holidays. They said, 'We are longing to see the
new baby.' They said, 'Is little Paul still as delicious as
he was?' They arrived bringing wine and summer
produce from all over the country, and all kinds of
67
people stood bottling fruit and making jams and chutneys with Alice and Dorothy. A crowd of children
played in the garden or were taken off to the woods for
picnics. Little Paul, so cuddlesome and funny, was
always on somebody's lap, and his laugh was heard
everywhere: this was his real nature, overshadowed by
Ben and his demands.
Because the house was so full, the older children
were in one room. Ben was already in a cot with high
wooden slatted sides, where he spent his time pulling
himself up to a sitting position, falling, rolling over,
pulling himself up ... This cot was put in the room
where the older children were, in the hope that Ben
would be made social, friendly, by his siblings. It was
not a success. He ignored them, would not respond to
their advances, and his crying - or, rather, bellowing made Luke shout at him, 'Oh shut up!' - but then he
burst into tears at his own unkindness. Helen, at the
age to cherish a baby, tried to hold Ben, but he was too
strong. Then all the older children in the house were
put into the attic, where they could make as much
noise as they wanted, and Ben went back into his own
room, 'the baby's room' - and from there they heard
his grunts and snuffles and roars of frustration as he
tried some feat of strength and fell down.
The new baby had of course been offered to everyone
to hold, when they asked, but it was painful to see how
their faces changed confronting this phenomenon. Ben
was always quickly handed back. Harriet came into the
kitchen one day and heard her sister Sarah say to a
cousin, 'That Ben gives me the creeps. He's like a
goblin or a dwarf or something. I'd rather have poor
Amy any day.'
68
This afflicted Harriet with remorse: poor Ben, whom
no one could love. She certainly could not! And David,
the good father, hardly touched him. She lifted Ben
from his cot, so much like a cage, and put him on the
big bed, and sat with him. 'Poor Ben, poor Ben,' she
crooned, stroking him. He clutched her shirt with both
hands, pulled himself up, and stood on her thigh. The
hard little feet hurt her. She tried to cuddle him,
persuade him to soften against her ... Soon she gave
up, put him back in his pen, or cage ... a roar of
frustration because he had been put down, and she
held out her hands to him, `Poor Ben, dear Ben,' and
he grasped her hands and pulled himself up and stood
grunting and roaring with triumph. Four months old
. . . He was like an angry, hostile little troll.
She did make a point of going to him every day
when the other children were out of the way, and
taking him to the big bed for a time of petting and play,
as she had with all of them. Never, not once, did he
subside into a loving moment. He resisted, he strove,
he fought - and then he turned his head and closed his
jaws over her thumb. Not as an ordinary baby will, in
the sucking bite that relieves the pain of teething, or
explores the possibilites of a mouth, tongue: she felt
her bone bend, and saw his cold triumphant grin.
She heard herself say, 'You aren't going to do me in,
I won't let you.'
But for a while she did try hard to make him
ordinary. She took him down into the big living-room
where all the family were, and put him into the playpen there - until his presence affected people, and
t hey tended to go away. Or she took him to the table in
69
her arms, as she had done with the others - but could
not hold him, he was too strong.
In spite of Ben, the summer holidays were wonderful. Again, there were two months of it. Again, David's
father, briefly descending, gave them a cheque, and
they could not have managed without. 'It is like being
in the middle of some bloody great fruit pudding, this
house,' said James. 'God knows how you do it.'
But afterwards, when Harriet thought of those holidays, what she remembered was how they all looked
at Ben. There would be a long thoughtful stare, puzzled, even anxious; but then came fear, though everyone tried to conceal it. There was horror, too: which is
what Harriet felt, more and more. He did not seem to
mind, or even to notice. It was hard to make out what
he did think of other people.
Harriet lay inside David's arms one night before
sleeping, talking over the day, as they always did, and
she remarked, out of a current of thoughts about the
summer, 'Do you know what this house is good for?
What people come for? It's for a good time, that's all.'
He was surprised. Even - she felt - shocked. 'But
what else do we do it for?' he enquired.
'I don't know,' she said, sounding helpless. Then she
turned in to his embrace, and he held her while she
wept. They had not yet resumed love-making. This
had never happened before. Making love during pregnancy, and very soon after pregnancy - this had never
been a problem. But now they were both thinking,
That creature arrived when we were being as careful
as we knew how - suppose another like him comes?
For they both felt - secretly, they were ashamed of the
thoughts they had about Ben - that he had willed
70
himself to be born, had invaded their ordinariness,
which had no defences against him or anything like
him. But not making love was not only a strain for
them both, it was a barrier, because they had to be
reminded continually of what threatened them ... so
they felt.
Then something bad happened. Just after all the
family had gone away, as the school term began, Paul
went into Ben's room by himself. Of all the children,
he was the most fascinated by Ben. Dorothy and Alice,
who were together in the kitchen, Harriet having gone
off to take the older ones to school, heard screams.
They ran upstairs to find that Paul had put his hand in
to Ben through the cot bars, and Ben had grabbed the
hand and pulled Paul hard against the bars, bending
the arm deliberately backwards. The two women freed
Paul. They did not bother to scold Ben, who was
crowing with pleasure and achievement. Paul's arm
was badly sprained.
No one felt like saying to the children, 'Be careful of
Ben.' But there was no need after the incident with
Paul's arm. That evening the children heard what had
happened, but did not look at their parents and Dorothy and Alice. They did not look at each other. They
stood silent, heads bent. This told the adults that the
children's attitudes to Ben were already formed: they
had discussed Ben and knew what to think about him.
Luke, Helen and Jane went away upstairs silently, and it
was a bad moment for the parents.
Alice said, watching them, 'Poor little things.'
Dorothy said, 'It's a shame.'
Harriet felt that these two women, these two elderly,
71
tough, seasoned survivors, were condemning her, Harriet, out of their vast experience of life. She glanced at
David, and saw he felt the same. Condemnation, and
criticism, and dislike: Ben seemed to cause these
emotions, bring them forth out of people into the
light .. .
The day after this incident, Alice announced that
she felt she was no longer needed in this house, she
would go back to her own life: she was sure Dorothy
could manage. After all, Jane was going to school now.
Jane would not have gone to school this year, a proper
school, all day, for another year: they had sent her
early. Precisely because of Ben, though no one had
said it. Alice left, with no suggestion it was because of
Ben. But she had told Dorothy, who had told the
parents, that Ben gave her the horrors. He must be a
changeling. Dorothy, always sensible, calm, matter-offact, had laughed at her. `Yes, I laughed at her,' she
reported. Then, grim, `But why did IT
David and Harriet conferred, in the low, almost
guilty, incredulous voices that Ben seemed to impose.
This baby was not six months old yet ... he was going
to destroy their family life. He was already destroying
it. They would have to make sure that he was in his
room at mealtimes and when the children were downstairs with the adults. Family times, in short.
Now Ben was almost always in his room, like a
prisoner. He outgrew his barred cot at nine months:
Harriet caught him just as he was about to fall over the
top. A small bed, an ordinary one, was put into his
room. He walked easily, holding on to the walls, or a
chair. He had never crawled, had pulled himself
straight up on to his feet. There were toys all over the
72
l f oor - or, rather, the fragments of them. He did not
play with them: he banged them on the floor or the
walls until they broke. The day he stood alone, by
himself, without holding on, he roared out his
triumph. All the other children had laughed, chuckled,
and wanted to be loved, admired, praised, on reaching
this moment of achievement. This one did not. It was
a cold triumph, and he staggered about, eyes gleaming
with hard - pleasure, while he ignored his mother.
Harriet often wondered what he saw when he looked
at her: nothing in his touch or his look ever seemed to
say, This is my mother.
One early morning, something took Harriet quickly
out of her bed into the baby's room, and there she saw
Ben balanced on the window-sill. It was high - heaven
only knew how he had got up there! The window was
open. In a moment he would have fallen out of it.
Harriet was thinking, What a pity I came in ... and
refused to be shocked at herself. Heavy bars were put
in, and there Ben would stand on the sill, gripping the
bars and shaking them, and surveying the outside
world, letting out his thick, raucous cries. All the
Christmas holidays he was kept in that room. It was
extraordinary how people, asking - cautiously -'How
is Ben?' and hearing, 'Oh, he's all right,' did not ask
again. Sometimes a yell from Ben loud enough to reach
downstairs silenced a conversation. Then the frown
appeared on their faces that Harriet dreaded, waiting
for it: she knew it masked some comment or thought
that could not be voiced.
And so the house was not the same; there was a
constraint and a wariness in everybody. Harriet knew
that sometimes people went up to look at Ben, out of
73
the fearful, uneasy curiosity he evoked, when she was
out of the way. She knew when they had seen him,
because of the way they looked at her afterwards. As if I
were a criminal! she raged to herself. She spent far
too much of her time quietly seething, but did not
seem able to stop. Even David, she believed, condemned her. She said to him, 'I suppose in the old
times, in primitive societies, this was how they treated a
woman who'd given birth to a freak. As if it was her
fault. But we are supposed to be civilized!'
He said, in the patient, watchful way he now had
with her, 'You exaggerate everything.'
'That's a good word - for this situation! Congratulations! Exaggerate!'
'Oh God, Harriet,' he said differently, helplessly,
'don't let's do this - if we don't stand together,
then ...'
It was at Easter that the schoolgirl Bridget, who had
returned to see if this miraculous kingdom of everyday
life was perhaps still there, enquired, 'What is wrong
with him? Is he a mongol?'
'Down's syndrome,' said Harriet. 'No one calls it
mongol now. But no, he's not.'
'What's wrong with him, then?'
'Nothing at all,' said Harriet airily. 'As you can see
for yourself.'
Bridget went away, and never came back.
The summer holidays again. It was 1975. There were
fewer guests: some had written or rung to say they
could not afford the train fare, or the petrol. 'Any
excuse is better than none,' remarked Dorothy.
'But people are hard up,' said David.
'They weren't so hard up before that they couldn't
74
afford to come and live here for weeks at a time at your
expense.'
Ben was over a year old now. He had not said one
word yet, but in other ways he was more normal. Now
it was difficult to keep him in his room. Children
playing in the garden heard his thick, angry cries, and
saw him up on the sill trying to push aside his bars.
So he came out of his little prison and joined them
downstairs. He seemed to know that he ought to be
like them. He would stand, head lowered, watching
how everyone talked, and laughed, sitting around the
big table; or sat talking in the living-room, while the
children ran in and out. His eyes were on one face,
then another: whomever he was looking at became
conscious of that insistent gaze and stopped talking; or
turned a back, or a shoulder, so as not to have to see
him. He could silence a room full of people just by
being there, or disperse them: they went off making
excuses.
Towards the end of the holidays, someone came
bringing a dog, a little terrier. Ben could not leave it
alone. Wherever the dog was, Ben followed. He did not
pet it, or stroke it: he stood staring. One morning when
Harriet came down to start breakfast for the children,
the dog was lying dead on the kitchen floor. It had had
a heart attack? Suddenly sick with suspicion, she
rushed up to see if Ben was in his room: he was
squatting on his bed, and when she came in, he looked
up and laughed, but soundlessly, in his way, which
was like a baring of the teeth. He had opened his door,
gone quietly past his sleeping parents, down the stairs,
found the dog, killed it, and gone back up again,
quietly, into his room, and shut the door ... all that,
75
by himself! She locked Ben in: if he could kill a dog,
then why not a child?
When she Went down again, the children were
crowding around the dead dog. And then the adults
came, and it was obvious what they thought.
Of course it was impossible - a small child killing a
lively dog. But officially the dog's death remained a
mystery; the vet said it had been strangled. This
business of the dog spoiled what was left of the
holidays, and people went off home early.
Dorothy said, `people are going to think twice
about
coming again.'
Three months later, Mr McGregor, the old grey cat,
was killed in the same way. He had always been afraid
of Ben, and kept out of reach. But Ben must have
stalked him, or found him sleeping.
At Christmas the house was half empty.
It was the worst year of Harriet's life, and she was
not able to cai a that people avoided them. Every day
was a long nightmare. She woke in the morning unable
to believe she would ever get through to the evening.
Ben was always on his feet, and had to be watched
every second. lie slept very little. He spent most of the
night standing on his window-sill, staring into the
garden, and if I-Iarriet looked in on him, he would turn
and give her a long stare, alien, chilling: in the half
dark of the room he really did look like a little troll or
a hobgoblin crmuching there. If he was locked in during
the day, he screamed and bellowed so that the whole
house resounded with it, and they were all afraid the
police would airrive. He would suddenly, for no reason
she could see,, take off and run into the garden, and
then out the gate and into the street. One day, she ran
76
a mile or more after him, seeing only that stubby squat
little figure going through traffic lights, ignoring cars
that hooted and people who screamed warnings at
him. She was weeping, panting, half crazed, desperate
to get to him before something terrible happened, but
she was praying, Oh, do run him over, do, yes, please
. . . She caught up with him just before a main road,
grabbed him, and held the fighting child with all her
strength. He was spitting and hissing, while he jerked
like a monster fish in her arms. A taxi went by; she
called to it, she pushed the child in, and got in after
him, holding him fast by an arm that seemed would
break with his flailing about and fighting.
What could be done? Again she went to Dr Brett,
who examined him and said he was physically in
order.
Harriet described his behaviour and the doctor
listened.
From time to time, a well-controlled incredulity
appeared on his face, and he kept his eyes down,
i f ddling with pencils.
`You can ask David, ask my mother,' said Harriet. `He's
a hyperactive child - that's how they are
described these days, I believe,' said old-fashioned Dr
Brett. She went to him because he was old-fashioned.
At last he did look at her, not evading her.
`What do you expect me to do, Harriet? Drug him
silly? Well, I am against it.'
She was crying inwardly, Yes, yes, yes, that's exactly
what I want! But she said, 'No, of course not.'
'He's physically normal for eighteen months. He's
very strong and active of course, but he's always been
77
that. You say he's not talking? But that's not unusual.
Wasn't Helen a late talker? I believe she was?'
'Yes,' said Harriet.
She took Ben home. Now he was locked into his
room each night, and there were heavy bars on the
door as well. Every second of his waking hours, he
watched. Harriet watched him while her mother managed everything else.
David said, 'What is the point of thanking you,
Dorothy? It seems everything has gone a long way
beyond thank-yous.'
'Everything has gone a long way beyond. Period.'
Said Dorothy.
Harriet was thin, red-eyed, haggard. Once again she
was bursting into tears over nothing at all. The children
kept out of her way. Tact? Were they afraid of her?
Dorothy suggested staying alone with Ben for a week
in August while the family went off together
somewhere.
Neither Harriet nor David would normally have
wanted to go anywhere, for they loved their home.
And what about the family coming for the summer?
'I haven't noticed any rush to book themselves in,'
said Dorothy.
They went to France, with the car. For Harriet it was
all happiness: she felt she had been given back her
children. She could not get enough of them, nor they
of her. And Paul, her baby whom Ben had deprived
her of, the wonderful three-year-old, enchanting, a
charmer - was her baby again. They were a family still!
Happiness ... they could hardly believe, any of them,
that Ben could have taken so much away from them.
When they got home, Dorothy was very tired and
78
she had a bad bruise on her forearm and another on
her cheek. She did not say what had happened. But
when the children had gone to bed on the first evening,
she said to Harriet and David, 'I have to talk - no, sit
down and listen.'
They sat with her at the kitchen table.
'You two are going to have to face it. Ben has got to
go into an institution.'
'But he's normal,' said Harriet, grim. 'The doctor
says he is.'
'He may be normal for what he is. But he is not
normal for what we are.'
'What kind of institution would take him?'
'There must be something,' said Dorothy, and began
to cry.
Now began a time when every night Harriet and
David lay awake talking about what could be done.
They were making love again, but it was not the same.
'This must be what women felt before there was birth
control,' Harriet said. 'Terrified. They waited for every
period, and when it came it meant reprieve for a
month. But they weren't afraid of giving birth to a
troll.'
While they talked, they always listened for sounds
from 'the baby's room' - words they never used now,
for they hurt. What was Ben doing that they had not
believed him capable of? Pulling those heavy steel bars
aside?
'The trouble is, you get used to hell,' said Harriet.
`After a day with Ben I feel as if nothing exists but him.
As if nothing has ever existed. I suddenly realize I
haven't remembered the others for hours. I forgot their
79
supper yesterday. Dorothy went to the pictures, and I
came down and found Helen cooking their supper.'
,It didn't hurt them.'
'She's eight.'
Having been reminded, by the week in France, of
what their family life really was, could be, Harriet was
determined not to let it all go. She found she was again
silently addressing Ben: 'I'm not going to let you
destroy us, you won't destroy me ...'
She was set on another real Christmas, and wrote
and telephoned to everyone. She made a point of
saying that Ben was 'much better, these days.'
Sarah asked if it would be 'all right' to bring Amy.
This meant that she had heard - everyone had - about
the dog, and the cat.
'It'll be all right if we are careful never to leave Amy
alone with Ben,' said Harriet, and Sarah, after a long
silence, said, 'My God, Harriet, we've been dealt a bad
hand, haven't we?' 'I suppose so,' said Harriet, but she
was rejecting this submission to being a victim of fate.
Sarah, yes; with her marital problems, and her mongol
child - yes. But she, Harriet, in the same boat?
She said to her own children, 'Please look after Amy.
Never leave her alone with Ben.'
'Would he hurt Amy the way he hurt Mr McGregor?'
asked Jane.
'He killed Mr McGregor,' Luke said fiercely. 'He
killed him.'
'And the poor dog,' said Helen. Both children were
accusing Harriet.
'Yes,' said Harriet, 'he might. That's why we have to
watch her all the time.'
The children, the way they did these days, were
80
looking at each other, excluding her, in some understanding of their own. They went off, without looking at
her.
The Christmas, with fewer people, was nevertheless
festive and noisy, a success; but Harriet found herself
longing for it to be over. It was the strain of it all,
watching Ben, watching Amy - who was the centre of
everything. Her head was too big, her body too squat,
but she was full of love and kisses and everyone adored
her. Helen, who had longed to make a pet of Ben, was
now able to love Amy. Ben watched this, silent, and
Harriet could not read the look in those cold yellowgreen eyes. But then she never could! Sometimes it
seemed to her that she spent her life trying to understand what Ben was feeling, thinking. Amy, who
expected everyone to love her, would go up to Ben,
chuckling, laughing, her arms out. Twice his age, but
apparently half his age, this afflicted infant, who was
radiant with affection, suddenly became silent; her
face was woeful, and she backed away, staring at him.
Just like Mr McGregor, the poor cat. Then she began to
cry whenever she saw him. Ben's eyes were never off
her, this other afflicted one, adored by everyone in the
house. But did he know himself afflicted? Was he, in
fact? What was he?
Christmas ended, and Ben was two and a few months
old. Paul was sent to a little nursery school down the
road, to get him away from Ben. The naturally highspirited and friendly child was becoming nervous and
irritable. He had fits of tears or of rage, throwing
himself on the floor screaming, or battering at Harriet's
knees, trying to get her attention, which never seemed
to leave Ben.
81
4
Dorothy went off to visit Sarah and her family.
Harriet was alone with Ben during the day. She tried
to be with him as she had with the others. She sat on
the floor with building blocks and toys you could push
about. She showed him colourful pictures. She sang
him little rhymes. But Ben did not seem to connect
with the toys, or the blocks. He sat among the litter of
bright objects and might put one block on another,
looking at Harriet to see if this was what he should do.
He stared hard at pictures held out to him, trying to
decipher their language. He would never sit on Harriet's knees, but squatted by her, and when she said,
'That's a bird, Ben, look - just like that bird on that
tree. And that's a flower,' he stared, and then turned
away. Apparently it was not that he could not understand how this block fitted into that or how to make a
pile of them, rather that he could not grasp the point
of it all, nor of the flower, nor the bird. Perhaps he was
too advanced for this sort of game? Sometimes Harriet
thought he was. His response to her nursery pictures
was that he went out into the garden and stalked a
thrush on the lawn, crouching down and moving on a
low fast run - and he nearly did catch the thrush. He
tore some primroses off their stems, and stood with
them in his hands, intently staring at them. Then he
crushed them in his strong little fists and let them
drop. He turned his head and saw Harriet looking at
him: he seemed to be thinking that she wanted him to
do something, but what? He stared at the spring
l f owers, looked up at a blackbird on a branch, and
came slowly indoors again.
One day, he talked. Suddenly. He did not say,
'Mummy,' or 'Daddy,' or his own name. He said, 'I
82
want cake.' Harriet did not even notice, at first, that he
was talking. Then she did, and told everyone, 'Ben's
talking. He's using sentences.' As their way was, the
other children encouraged him: 'That's very good,
Ben,' 'Clever Ben!' But he took no notice of them. From
then on he announced his needs. 'I want that.' 'Give
me that.' 'Go for a walk now.' His voice was heavy and
uncertain, each word separate, as if his brain were a
lumber-house of ideas and objects, and he had to
identify each one.
The children were relieved he was talking normally.
'Hello, Ben,' one would say. 'Hello,' Ben replied,
carefully handing back exactly what he had been given.
'How are you, Ben?' Helen asked. 'How are you?' he
replied. 'No' said Helen, 'now you must say, "I'm very
well, thank you," or, "I'm fine".'
Ben stared while he worked it out. Then he said
clumsily, 'I'm very well.'
He watched the children, particularly Luke and
Helen, all the time. He studied how they moved, sat
down, stood up; copied how they ate. He had understood that these two, the older ones, were more socially
accomplished than Jane; and he ignored Paul
altogether. When the children watched television, he
squatted near them and looked from the screen to their
faces, for he needed to know what reactions were
appropriate. If they laughed, then, a moment later, he
contributed a loud, hard, unnatural-sounding laugh.
What was natural to him, it seemed, in the way of
amusement was his hostile-looking teeth-bared grin,
that looked hostile. When they became silent and still
with attention, because of some exciting moment, then
83
he tensed his muscles, like them, and seemed absorbed
in the screen - but really he kept his eyes on them.
Altogether, he was easier. Harriet thought: Well, any
ordinary child is at its most difficult for about a year
after it gets to its feet. No sense of self-preservation, no
sense of danger: they hurl themselves off beds and
chairs, launch themselves into space, run into roads,
have to be watched every second ... And they are also,
she added, at their most charming, delightful, heartbreakingly sweet and funny. And then they gradually
become sensible and life is easier.
Life had become easier ... but this was only as she
saw it, as Dorothy brought home to her.
Dorothy came back to this household after what she
called 'a rest' of some weeks, and Harriet could see her
mother was preparing for a 'real talk' with her.
'Now, girl, would you say that I am interfering? That I
give you a lot of unwanted advice?'
They were sitting at the big table, mid-morning, with
cups of coffee. Ben was where they could watch him,
as always, Dorothy was trying to make what she said
humorous, but Harriet felt threatened. Her mother's
honest pink cheeks were bright with embarrassment,
her blue eyes anxious.
'No,' said Harriet. 'You aren't. You don't.'
'Well, now I'm going to have my say.'
But she had to stop: Ben began banging a stone
against a metal tray. He did this with all his force. The
noise was awful, but the women waited until Ben
stopped: interrupted, he would have raged and hissed
and spat.
'You have five children,' Dorothy said. 'Not one. Do
you realize that I might just as well be the mother of
84
the others when I'm here? No, I don't believe you do,
you've got so taken over by. . .'
Ben again banged the tray with his stone, in a frenzy
of exulting accomplishment. It looked as if he believed
he was hammering metal, forging something: one could
easily imagine him, in the mines deep under the earth,
with his kind ... Again they waited until he stopped
the noise.
'It's not right,' said Dorothy. And Harriet
remembered how her mother's 'That's not right!' had regulated her childhood.
'I'm getting on, you know,' said Dorothy. 'I can't go
on like this, or I'll get ill.'
Yes, Dorothy was rather thin, even gaunt. Yes, Harriet thought, full of guilt as usual, she should have
noticed.
'And you have a husband, too,' said Dorothy, apparently not knowing how she was turning the knife in
her daughter's heart. 'He's very good, you know, Harriet. I don't know how he puts up with it.'
The Christmas after Ben became three only partly
i f lled the house. A cousin of David's had said, 'I've
been inspired by you, Harriet! After all, I've got a
home, too. It's not as big as yours, but it's a nice little
house.' Several of the family went there. But others
said they were coming: made a point of coming, Harriet
realized. These were the near relations.
Again a pet was brought. This time it was a big dog,
a cheerful boisterous mongrel, Sarah's children's
friend, but most particularly Amy's. Of course all the
children loved him, but Paul most of all, and this made
Harriet's heart ache, for they could have no dog or cat
in their home. She even thought: Well, now Ben is
85
more sensible, perhaps . . .
But she knew it was
impossible. She watched how the big dog seemed to
know that Amy, the loving little child in the big ugly
body, needed gentleness: he moderated his exuberance
for her. Amy would sit by the dog with her arm around
his neck, and if she was clumsy with him, he lifted his
muzzle and gently pushed her away a little, or gave a
small warning sound that said, 'Be careful.' Sarah said
this dog was like a nursemaid to Amy. 'Just like Nana
in Peter Pan,' the children said. But if Ben was in
the
room, the dog watched him carefully and went to lie
in a corner, his head on his paws, stiff with attention.
One morning when people were sitting around having
breakfast, Harriet for some reason turned her head and
saw the dog, asleep, and Ben going silently up to him
in a low crouch, hands held out in front of him ...
'Ben!' said Harriet sharply. She saw those cold eyes
turn towards her, caught a gleam of pure malice.
The dog, alerted, scrambled up, and his hair stood
on end. He whined anxiously, and came into the part
of the room where they all were, and lay down under
the table.
Everyone had seen this, and sat silent, while Ben
came to Dorothy and said, 'I want milk.' She poured
him some, and he drank it down. Then he looked at
them all staring at him. Again he seemed to be trying
to understand them. He went into the garden, where
they could see him, a squat little gnome, poking with a
stick at the earth. The other children were upstairs
somewhere.
Around the table sat Dorothy, with Amy on her lap,
Sarah, Molly, Frederick, James and David. Also
86
Angela, the successful sister, 'the coper', whose children were all normal.
The atmosphere made Harriet say defiantly, 'All
right, then, let's have it.'
She thought it not without significance, as they say,
that it was Frederick who said, 'Now look here, Harriet,
you've got to face it, he's got to go into an institution.'
'Then we have to find a doctor who says he's
abnormal,'said Harriet. 'Dr Brett certainly won't.'
'Get another doctor,' said Molly. 'These things can
be arranged.' The two large haystacky people, with
their red well-fed faces, were united in determination,
nothing vague about them now they had decided there
was a crisis, and one that - even indirectly - threatened
them. They looked like a pair of judges after a good
lunch, Harriet thought, and glanced at David to see if
she could share this criticism with him; but he was
staring down at the table, mouth tight. He agreed with
them.
Angela said, laughing, 'Typical upper-class
ruthlessness.'
No one could remember that note being struck, or at
least not so sharply, at this table before. Silence, and
then Angela softened it with 'Not that I don't agree.'
'Of course you agree,' said Molly. 'Anyone sensible
would have to.'
'It's the way you said it,' said Angela.
'What does it matter how it is said?' enquired
Frederick.
'And who is going to pay for it?' asked David. 'I
can't. All I can do is to keep the bills paid, and that is
with James's help.'
'Well, James is going to have to bear the brunt of this
87
40
One,' said Frederick, 'but we'll chip in.' It was the first
time this couple had offered any financial help. 'Mean,
like all their sort,' the rest of the family had agreed;
and now this judgement was being remembered. They
Would come for a stay of ten days and contribute a pair
Of pheasants, a couple of bottles of very good wine.
Their 'chipping in', everyone knew, wouldn't amount
to much.
Full of division, the family sat silent.
Then James said, 'I'll do what I can. But things are
clot as good as they were. Yachts are not everyone's
Priority in hard times.'
Silence again, and everyone was looking at Harriet.
'You are funny people,' she said, setting herself apart
r f om them. 'You've been here so often and you know I mean, you really know what the problem is. What are
We going to say to the people who run this institution?'
'It depends on the institution,' said Molly, and her
Urge person seemed full of energy, conviction: as if
she had swallowed Ben whole and was digesting him,
thought Harriet. She said, mildly enough, though she
trembled, 'You mean, we have to find one of those
Places that exist in order to take on children families
simply want to get rid of?'
'Rich families,' said Angela, with a defiant little sniff.
Molly, confronting impertinence, said firmly, 'Yes. If
there is no other kind of place. But one thing is
obvious: if something isn't done, then it's going to be
catastrophic.'
'It is catastrophic,' said Dorothy, firmly taking her
Position. 'The other children . . . they're suffering.
?ou're so involved with it, girl, that you don't see it.'
'Look,' said David, impatient and angry because he
a8
could not stand this, fibres tangled with Harriet, with
his parents, being tugged and torn. 'Look, I agree.
And
some time Harriet is going to have to agree. And as
far
as I am concerned, that time is now. I don't think I can
stick it any longer.' And now he did look at his wife,
and it was a pleading, suffering look. Please, he was
saying to Harriet. Please.
'Very well,' said Harriet. 'If some place can be found
that .. .' And she began to cry.
Ben came in from the garden and stood watching
them, in his usual position, which was apart from
everyone else. He wore brown dungarees and a brown
shirt, both in strong material. Everything he wore had to
be thick, because he tore his clothes, destroyed
them. With his yellowish stubbly low-growing hair, his
stony unblinking eyes, his stoop, his feet planted apart
and his knees bent, his clenched held-forward i f sts, he
seemed more than ever like a gnome.
'She is crying,' he remarked, of his mother. He took
a piece of bread off the table and went out.
'All right,' said Harriet, 'what are you going to tell
them?'
'Leave it to us,' said Frederick.
'Yes,' said Molly.
'My God!' said Angela, with a kind of bitter appreciation of them. 'Sometimes when I'm with you, I understand everything about this country.'
'Thank you,' said Molly.
'Thank you,' said Frederick.
'You aren't being fair, girl,' said Dorothy.
'Fair,' said Angela, and Harriet, and Sarah, her
daughters, almost all at once.
89
And then everyone but Harriet laughed. In this way
was Ben's fate decided.
A few days later, Frederick rang to say that a place
had been found and a car was coming for Ben. At once.
Tomorrow.
Harriet was frantic: the haste of it, the - yes, ruthlessness! And the doctor who had authorized this? Or
would? A doctor who had not even seen Ben? She said
all this to David, and knew from his manner that a
good deal had gone on behind her back. His parents
had talked to him at his office. David had said something like 'Yes, I'll see to it' when Molly, whom
suddenly Harriet hated, had said, 'You'll have to be
firm with Harriet.'
'It's either him or us,' said David to Harriet. He
added, his voice full of cold dislike for Ben, 'He's
probably just dropped in from Mars. He's going back
to report on what he's found down here.' He laughed cruelly, it seemed to Harriet, who was silently taking
in the fact - which of course she had half known
already - that Ben was not expected to live long in this
institution, whatever it was.
'He's a little child,' she said, 'He's our child.'
'No, he's not,' said David, finally. 'Well, he certainly
isn't mine.'
They were in the living-room. Children's voices rose
sharp and distant from the dark winter garden. On the
same impulse, David and Harriet went to the window
and pulled back the heavy curtains. The garden held
dim shapes of tree and shrub, but the light from this
warm room reached across the lawn to a shrub that
was starkly black with winter, lit twiggy growths that
showed a glitter of water, and illuminated the white
90
trunk of a birch. Two small figures, indistinguishably
unisex in their many-coloured padded jackets, trousers, woollen caps, emerged from the black under a
holly thicket, and came forward. They were Helen and
Luke, on some adventure. Both held sticks and were
prodding them here and there into last year's leaves.
'Here it is!' Helen's voice rose in triumph, and the
parents saw, emerging into the light on the end of the
stick, the summer's lost red-and-yellow plastic ball. It
was dirtied and squashed, but whole. The two children
began a fast stamping dance around and around, the
rescued ball held aloft in triumph. Then, suddenly, for
no obvious reason, they came racing up to the french
doors. The parents sat down on a sofa, facing the doors,
which burst inwards, and there they were, two slight,
elegant little creatures, with flaring red, frost-burned
cheeks and eyes full of the excitements of the dark
wilderness they had been part of. They stood breathing
heavily, their eyes slowly adjusting to reality, the
warm, lit family room and their parents sitting there
looking at them. For a moment it was the meeting of
two alien forms of life: the children had been part of
some old savagery, and their blood still pounded with
it; but now they had to let their wild selves go away
while they rejoined their family. Harriet and David
shared this with them, were with them in imagination
and in memory, from their own childhoods: they could
see themselves clearly, two adults, sitting there, tame,
domestic, even pitiable in their distance from wildness
and freedom.
Seeing their parents there alone, no other children
around, and above all, no Ben, Helen came to her
father, Luke to his mother, and Harriet and David
91
A
embraced their two adventurous little children, their
children, holding them tight.
Next morning the car, which was a small black van,
came for Ben. Harriet had known it was coming,
because David had not gone to work. He had stayed so
as to 'handle' her! David went upstairs, and brought
down suitcases and holdalls that he had packed quietly
while she was giving the children breakfast.
He flung these into the van. Then, his face set hard,
so that Harriet hardly knew him, he picked Ben up
from where he sat on the floor in the living-room,
carried him to the van, and put him in. Then he came
fast to Harriet, with the same hard set face, and put his
arm around her, turned her away from the sight of the
van, which was already on its way (she could hear
Yells and shouts coming from inside it), and took her
to the sofa, where - still holding her tight - he said,
over and over again, 'We have to do it, Harriet. We
have to.' She was weeping with the shock of it, and
with relief, and with gratitude to him, who was taking
all the responsibility.
When the children came home, they were told Ben
had gone to stay with someone.
'With Granny?' asked Helen, anxious.
'No.'
Four pairs of suspicious, apprehensive eyes became
suddenly full of relief. Hysterical relief. The children
danced about, unable to help themselves, and then
pretended it was a game they had thought up then and
there.
At supper they were overbright, giggling, hysterical.
But in a quiet moment Jane asked shrilly, 'Are you
going to send us away, too?' She was a stolid, quiet
little girl, Dorothy in miniature, never saying anything
unnecessary. But now her large blue eyes were fixed in
terror on her mother's face.
'No, of course we aren't,' said David, sounding curt.
Luke explained, 'They are sending Ben away because
he isn't really one of us.'
In the days that followed, the family expanded like
paper flowers in water. Harriet understood what a
burden Ben had been, how he had oppressed them all,
how much the children had suffered; knew that they
had talked about it much more than the parents had
wanted to know, had tried to come to terms with Ben.
But now Ben was gone their eyes shone, they were full
of high spirits, and they kept coming to Harriet with
little gifts of a sweet or a toy, 'This is for you, Mummy.'
Or they rushed up to kiss her, or stroke her face, or
nuzzle to her like happy calves or foals. And David
took days off from work to be with them all - to be
with her. He was careful with her, tender. As if I were
ill, she decided rebelliously. Of course she thought all
the time of Ben, who was a prisoner somewhere. What
kind of a prisoner? She pictured the little black van,
remembered his cries of rage as he was taken away.
The days went by, and normality filled the house.
Harriet heard the children talking about the Easter
holidays. 'It will be all right now that Ben isn't here,'
said Helen.
They had always understood so much more than she
had wanted to acknowledge.
While she was part of the general relief, and could
hardly believe she had been able to stand such strain,
and for so long, she could not banish Ben from her
mind. It was not with love, or even affection, that she
93
thought of him, and she disliked herself for not being
able to find one little spark of normal feeling: it was
guilt and horror that kept her awake through the nights.
David knew she was awake, though she did try to hide
it.
Then one morning she started up out of sleep, out of a
bad dream, though she did not know what, and she
said, 'I'm going to see what they are doing to Ben.'
David opened his eyes, and lay silent, staring over
his arm at the window. He had been dozing, not asleep.
She knew he had feared this, and there was something
about him then that said to her: Right, then that's it,
it's enough.
'David, I've got to.'
'Don't,' he said.
'I simply have to.'
Again she knew from the way he lay there, not
looking at her, and did not say anything more than that
one syllable, that it was bad for her, that he was making
decisions as he lay there. He stayed where he was for a
few minutes, and then got out of bed, and went out of
the room and downstairs.
When she had got her clothes on, she rang Molly,
who was at once coldly angry. 'No, I'm not going to tell
you where it is. Now you've done it, then leave it
alone.'
But at last she did give Harriet the address.
Again Harriet was wondering why she was always
treated like a criminal. Ever since Ben was born it's
been like this, she thought. Now it seemed to her the truth,
that everyone had silently condemned her. I have
suffered a misfortune, she told herself; I haven't committed
a crime.
94
Ben had been taken to a place in the North of
England; it would be four or five hours' drive - perhaps
more, if she was unlucky with traffic. There was bad
traffic, and she drove through grey wintry rain. It was
early afternoon when she approached a large solid
building of dark stone, in a valley high among moors
she could hardly see for grey drifting rain. The place
stood square and upright among dismal dripping evergreens, and its regular windows, three rows of them,
were barred.
She entered a small entrance lobby that had a handwritten card tacked on the inner door: 'Ring for Attendance.' She rang, and waited, and nothing happened.
Her heart was beating. She still surged with the adrenalin that had given her the impetus to come, but the
long drive had subdued her, and this oppressive building was telling her nerves, if not her intelligence - for,
after all, she had no facts to go on - that what she had
feared was true. Yet she did not know exactly what
that was. She rang again. The building was silent: she
could hear the shrill of a bell a long way off in its
interior. Again, nothing, and she was about to go
around to the back when the door abruptly opened to
show a slatternly girl wearing jerseys, cardigans, and a
thick scarf. She had a pale little face under a mass of
curly yellow hair that had a blue ribbon holding a
queue like a sheep's tail. She seemed tired.
'Yes?' she asked.
Harriet saw, understanding what this meant, that
people simply did not come here.
She said, already stubborn, 'I'm Mrs Lovatt and I've
come to see my son.'
95
It was evident that these were words this institution,
whatever it was, did not expect to meet.
The girl stared, gave an involuntary little shake of
the head that expressed incapacity, and then said, 'Dr
MacPherson isn't here this week.' She was Scottish,
too, and her accent was strong.
'Someone must be deputizing for him,' said Harriet
decisively.
The girl fell back before Harriet's manner, smiling
uncertainly, and very worried. She muttered, 'Wait
here, then,' and went inside. Harriet followed her
before the big door was shut to exclude her. The girl
did glance around, as if she planned to say, You must
wait outside, but instead she said, 'I'll fetch someone,'
and went on into the dark caverns of a corridor that
had small ceiling lights all along it, hardly disturbing
the gloom. There was a smell of disinfectant. Absolute
silence. No, after a time Harriet became aware of a high
thin screaming that began, and stopped, and went on again,
coming from the back of the building.
Nothing happened. Harriet went out into the vestibule, which was already darkening with the approaching night. The rain was now a cold deluge, silent and
regular. The moors had disappeared.
She rang again, decisively, and returned to the
corridor.
Two figures appeared, a long way off under the
pinpoints of the ceiling lights, and came towards her. A
young man, in a white coat that was not clean, was
followed by the girl, who now had a cigarette in her
mouth and was screwing up her eyes from the smoke.
Both looked tired and uncertain.
He was an ordinary young man, though worn down
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in a general way; taken bit by bit, hands, face, eyes, he
was unremarkable, but there was something desperate
about him, as if he contained anger, or hopelessness.
'You can't be here,' he said, in a flurried indecisive
way. 'We don't have visiting days here.' His voice was
South London, flat and nasal.
'But I am here,' said Harriet. 'I am here to see my son
Ben Lovatt.'
And suddenly he took in a breath, and looked at the
girl, who pursed her lips together and raised her
eyebrows.
'Listen,' said Harriet. 'I don't think you understand.
I'm not just going away, you know. I've come to see my
son, and that is what I am going to do.'
He knew she meant it. He slowly nodded, as if
saying, Yes, but that isn't the point. He was looking
hard at her. She was being given a warning, and from
someone who was taking the responsibility for it. He
might be a rather pitiable young man, and certainly an
overtired and inadequately fed one, doing this job
because he could not get another, but the weight of his
position - the unhappy weight of it - was speaking
through him, and his expression and his reddened,
smoke-tired eyes were severe, authoritative, to be taken
seriously.
'When people dump their kids here, they don't come
and see them after,' he said.
'You see, you don't understand at all,' said the girl.
Harriet heard herself explode with 'I'm sick of being
told I don't understand this and that. I'm the child's
mother. I'm Ben Lovatt's mother. Do you understand
that?'
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Suddenly they were all three together in understanding, even in desperate acceptance of some kind of
general fatality.
He nodded, and said, 'Well, I'll go and see ...'
'And I am coming, too,' she said.
This really did alert him. 'Oh no,' he exclaimed,
'You are not' He said something to the girl, who began
running surprisingly fast down the corridor. 'You stay
here,' he said to Harriet, and strode after the girl.
Harriet saw the girl turn right and disappear, and
without thinking she opened a door at her right hand.
She saw the young man's arm raised in imprecation,
or warning, while what was behind that door reached
her.
She was at the end of a long ward, which had any
number of cots and beds along the walls. In the cots
were - monsters. While she strode rapidly through the
ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see
that every bed or cot held an infant or small child in
whom the human template had been wrenched out of
pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A
baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a
body ... then something like a stick insect, enormous
bulging eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbs ...
a small girl all blurred, her flesh guttering and melting
- a doll with chalky swollen limbs, its eyes wide and
blank, like blue ponds, and its mouth open, showing a
swollen little tongue. A lanky boy was skewed, one
half of his body sliding from the other. A child seemed
at first glance normal, but then Harriet saw there was
no back to its head; it was all face, which seemed to
scream at her. Rows of freaks, nearly all asleep, and all
silent. They were literally drugged out of their minds.
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Well, nearly silent: there was a dreary sobbing from a
cot that had its sides shielded with blankets. The high
intermittent screaming, nearer now, still assaulted her
nerves. A smell of excrement, stronger than the disinfectant. Then she was out of the nightmare ward and
in another corridor, parallel to the one she had first
seen, and identical. At its end she saw the girl, followed by the young man, come a little way towards
her and then again turn right. . . . Harriet ran fast,
hearing her feet thud on the boards, and turned where
they did, and was in a tiny room holding trolleys of
medicines and drugs. She ran through this and was
now in a long cement-floored passage that had doors
with inspection grilles in them all along the wall facing
her. The young man and the girl were opening one of
these doors as she arrived beside them. All three were
breathing heavily.
`Shit,' said the young man, meaning her being there.
'Literally,' said Harriet as the door opened on a
square room whose walls were of white shiny plastic
that was buttoned here and there and looked like fake
expensive leather upholstery. On the floor, on a green
foam-rubber mattress, lay Ben. He was unconscious.
He was naked, inside a strait-jacket. His pale yellow
tongue protruded from his mouth. His flesh was dead
white, greenish. Everything - walls, the floor, and Ben
- was smeared with excrement. A pool of dark yellow
urine oozed from the pallet which was soaked.
'I told you not to come!' shouted the young man. He
took Ben's shoulders and the girl Ben's feet. From the
way they touched the child, Harriet saw they were not
brutal; that was not the point at all. They lifted Ben
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thus - for in this way they had to touch very little of
him - out of this room, along the corridor a little way,
and through another door. She followed, and stood
watching. This was a room that had sinks all along one
wall, an immense bath, and a sloping cement shelf
with plugs all along it. They put Ben on this shelf,
unwound the strait-jacket, and, having adjusted the
temperature of the water, began washing him down
with a hose that was attached to one of the taps. Harriet
leaned against the wall, watching. She was shocked to
the point where she felt nothing at all. Ben did not
move. He lay like a drowned fish on the slab, was
turned over several times by the girl, when the young
man interrupted the hosing process for the purpose,
and was finally carried by them both to another slab,
where they dried him and then took a clean straitjacket from a pile and put it on him.
'Why?' demanded Harriet, fierce. They did not
answer.
They took the child, trussed, unconscious, his tongue
lolling, out of the room, down the corridor, and into
another room that had a cement shelf like a bed in it.
They put Ben on it, and then both stood up and sighed:
'Phew.'
'Well, there he is,' said the young man. He stood for a
moment, eyes closed, recovering from the ordeal, and then lit
a cigarette. The girl put out her hand for one; he gave it to
her. They stood smoking, looking at Harriet in an
exhausted, defeated way.
She did not know what to say. Her heart was hurting
as it would for one of her own, real children, for Ben
looked more ordinary than she had ever seen him,
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with those hard cold alien eyes of his closed. Pathetic:
she had never seen him as pathetic before.
'I think I'll take him home,' she said.
'It's up to you,' said the young man shortly.
The girl was looking curiously at Harriet, as if she
were part of the phenomenon that was Ben, of the
same nature. She asked, 'What are you going to do with
him?' She added, and Harriet recognized fear in her
voice, 'He's so strong - I've never seen anything like
it.,
'None of us have seen anything like it,' said the
young man.
'Where are his clothes?'
Now he laughed, scornful, and said, 'You're going to put
his clothes on and take him home, just like that?'
'Why not? He was wearing clothes when he came.'
The two attendants - nurses, orderlies, whatever
they were - exchanged looks. Then both took a drag on
their cigarettes.
He said, 'I don't think you understand, Mrs Lovatt.
How far have you got to go, for a start?'
'Four or five hours' driving.'
He laughed again, at the impossibility of it - of her,
Harriet - and said, 'He's going to come round on the
journey, and then what?'
'Well, he'll see me,' she said, and saw from their
faces that she was being stupid. 'All right, then, what do
you advise?'
'Wrap him in a couple of blankets, over the straitjacket,' said the girl.
'And then drive like hell,' he said.
The three now stood in silence, looking at each
other, a long, sober look.
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'You try doing this job,' said the girl suddenly, full
of rage against fate. 'You just try it. Well, I'm leaving at
the end of this month.'
'And so am 1, no one sticks it longer than a few
weeks,' said the man.
'All right,' said Harriet. 'I'm not going to complain,
or anything.'
'You'll have to sign a form. We have to be covered,'
he said.
But they could not easily find the form. At last, after a
lot of rummaging about in a filing cabinet, they
produced a slip of paper, mimeographed years ago,
that said Harriet acquitted the institution of all
responsibility.
Now she picked Ben up, touching him for the first
time. He was deadly cold. He lay heavy in her arms,
and she understood the words 'a dead weight'.
She went out into the corridor, saying, 'I'm not going
through that ward again.'
'Who could blame you?' said the young man, wearily
sarcastic. He had got hold of a load of blankets, and
they wrapped Ben in two, carried him out to the car,
laid him on the back seat, and piled more blankets
over him. Only his face showed.
She stood with the two young people by the car.
They could hardly see each other. Apart from the car
lights, and the lights of the building, it was dark. Water
squelched under foot. The young man took out of his
overall pocket, a plastic package containing a syringe, a
couple of needles, and some ampules.
'You had better take these,' he said.
Harriet hesitated, and the girl said, 'Mrs Lovatt, I
don't think you realize - '
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She nodded, took the package, got in.
'You can give him up to four shots a day, no more,'
said the young man.
As she was about to let the clutch pedal out, she
asked, 'Tell me, how long do you think he would have
lasted?'
Their faces were white patches in the gloom, but she
could see that he shook his head, turning away. The
girl's voice came: 'None of them last long. But this one
. . . he's very strong. He's the strongest any of us have
seen.'
'Which means he would have lasted longer?'
'No,' he said. 'No, that's not it at all. Because he's so
strong, he fights all the time, and so he has to have
bigger shots. It kills them.'
'All right,' said Harriet. 'Well, thank you both.'
They stood watching as she drove off, but almost at
once vanished into the wet dark. As she rounded the
drive, she saw them standing in the dimly lit porch,
close together, as if reluctant to go in.
She drove as fast as she could through the wintry
rain, avoiding the main roads, keeping an eye on the
heap of blankets behind her. About half-way home she
saw the blankets heave and convulse, and Ben woke
with a bellow of rage, and thrashed about, landing on
the floor of the car, where he began to scream, not like
the thin high automatic screaming she had heard at the
institution but screams of fear that vibrated through
her. She stuck it out for half an hour, feeling the thuds
that Ben made vibrate through the car. She was looking
for a lay-by that had no other car in it, and when she
found one, she stopped, let the engine run, and took
out the syringe. She knew how to use it, from some
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illness of the other children. She broke open the
capsule, which had no brand name on it, and filled the
syringe. Then she leaned over the back of the seat. Ben,
naked except for the strait-jacket, and blue with cold,
was heaving and struggling and bellowing. His eyes
looked up at her in a glare of hate. He didn't recognize
her, she thought. She did not dare unwind the jacket.
She was afraid of injecting him anywhere near his
neck. At last she managed to grab, and hold, an ankle,
jabbed the needle into the lower part of his calf, and
waited until he went limp: it took a few moments.
What was this stuff?
Again she put him on the back seat under the
blankets, and now she drove on the main roads home.
She got there at about eight. The children would be
sitting around the kitchen table. And David would be
with them: he would not have gone to work.
With Ben a mound of blankets in her arms, his face
covered, she went into the living-room, and looked
over the low wall to where they all sat around the big
table. Luke. Helen. Jane. Little Paul. And David, his
face set and angry. And very tired.
She remarked, 'They were killing him,' and saw that
David would not forgive her for saying this in front of
the children. All showed fear.
She went straight up the stairs to the big bedroom,
and through it to 'the baby's room', and put Ben on the
bed. He was waking up. And then it began, the fighting,
the heaving, the screaming. Again he was on the floor,
rolling around on it; and again he flexed and bent and
thrashed, and his eyes were pure hate.
She could not take off the strait-jacket.
She went down into the kitchen, and got milk and
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biscuits while her family sat and watched her in total
silence.
Ben's screams and struggling were shaking the
house.
'The police will be here,' said David.
'Keep them quiet,' she commanded, and went up
with the food.
When Ben saw what she held, he became silent and
still, and his eyes were avid. She lifted him like a
mummy, put the cup of milk to his lips, and he almost
drowned as he gulped: he was starving. She fed him
bits of biscuit, keeping her fingers clear of his teeth.
When what she had brought was finished, he began
roaring and flailing again. She gave him another jab.
The children were in front on the television, but
were not watching it. Jane and Paul were crying. David
sat at the table with his head in his hands. She said
softly, for him to hear, 'All right, I am a criminal. But
they were murdering him.'
He did not move. She had her back to him. She did
not want to see his face.
She said, 'He would have been dead in a few months.
Weeks, probably.' A silence. At last she turned. She
could hardly bear to look at him. He looked ill, but that
was not it ...
She said, 'I couldn't stand it.'
He said deliberately, 'I thought that was the idea.'
She cried out, 'Yes, but you didn't see it, you didn't
see - !'
'I was careful not to see,' he said. 'What did you
suppose was going to happen? That they were going to
turn him into some well-adjusted member of society
105
and then everything would be lovely?' He was jeering
at her, but it was because his throat was stiff with tears.
Now they looked at each other, long, hard, seeing
everything about each other. She thought, All right, he
was right, and I was wrong. But it's done.
She said aloud, 'All right, but it's done.'
'That's the mot juste, I think.'
She sat down beside the children on the sofa. Now
she saw they all had tear-stained faces. She could not
touch them to comfort them, because it was she who
made them cry.
When she at last said 'Bed,' they all got up at once
and went, without looking at her.
She took supplies of suitable food for Ben up to the
big bedroom. David had moved his things to another
room.
When Ben woke towards morning and began his
roaring, she fed him, and drugged him.
She gave the children breakfast as always, and tried
to be normal. They tried, too. No one mentioned Ben.
When David came down, she said, 'Please take them
to school.'
Then the house had only her and Ben in it. When he
woke, she fed him but did not drug him. He roared and
struggled, but, she thought, much less.
In a lull, when he seemed worn out, she said, 'Ben,
you are at home, not in that place.' He was listening.
'When you stop making all that noise, I'll take you
out of that thing they put you in.'
It was too soon, he began struggling again. Through
his screams she heard voices, and went to the banisters. David had not gone to his office, had stayed home
106
to help her. Two young policewomen stood there, and
David was talking to them. They went away.
What had they been told? She did not ask.
Towards the time the children were due home, she
said to Ben, 'I want you to be quiet now, Ben. The
other children will be here and you'll frighten them
screaming like that.'
He became quiet: it was exhaustion.
He was on the floor, which was by now streaked
with excrement. She carried him to the bathroom, took
off the jacket, put him in the bath and washed him,
and saw that he was shuddering with terror: he had
not always been unconscious when they washed him
in that place. She took him back to the bed, and said,
'If you start all that again, then I'm going to have to put
that thing back on you.'
He ground his teeth at her, his eyes blazing. But he
was afraid, too. She was going to have to control him
through fear.
She cleaned his room while he lay moving his arms
about, as if he had forgotten how to do it. He had been
in that cloth prison, probably, ever since he had been
in the institution.
Then he squatted on his bed, moving his arms and
staring around his room, recognizing it, and her, at
last.
He said, 'Open the door.'
She said, 'No, not until I am sure you will behave
well.'
He was about to start again, but she shouted at him,
'Ben, I mean it! You shout and scream and I'll tie you
up.
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He controlled himself. She handed him sandwiches,
which he crammed into his mouth, choking.
He had unlearned all the basic social skills that it
had been so hard to teach him.
She talked quietly while he ate. 'And now listen to
me, Ben. You have to listen. You behave well and
everything will be all right. You must eat properly.
You must use the pot or got to the lavatory. And you
mustn't scream and fight.' She was not sure he heard
her. She repeated it. She went on repeating it.
That evening she stayed with Ben, and she did not
see the other children at all. David went up to the other
room away from her. How she felt at this time was that
she was shielding them from Ben while she re-educated him for family life. But how they felt it, she
knew, was that she had turned her back on them all
and chosen to go off into alien country, with Ben.
That night she locked the door on him, and bolted
it, left him undrugged and hoped he would sleep. He
did, but woke, screaming in fear. She went in to him,
and found him backed against the wall at the end of
the bed, an arm up over his face, unable to hear her,
while she talked, and talked, using reasonable persuasive words against this storm of terror. At last he became
quiet and she gave him food. He could not get enough
food: he had really been starving. They had had to
keep him drugged, and, when drugged, he could not
eat.
Fed, he again backed himself against the wall, squatted on the bed, and looked at the door where his jailers
would enter: he had not really understood he was at
home.
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Then he nodded off ... woke with a bellow; nodded
off ... woke ... She calmed him, and he dropped off.
Days passed; nights passed.
He at last understood he was at home and safe.
Slowly, he stopped eating as if every mouthful were his
last. Slowly, he used his pot, and then allowed
himself to be taken by the hand along the passage to
the lavatory. Then he came downstairs, darting glances
around him to see the enemy before he could be
captured again. As he saw it, this house was where he
had been trapped. And by his father. When he first set
eyes on David, he backed away, hissing.
David did not try to reassure him; as far as he was
concerned, Ben was Harriet's responsibility, and his
was for the children - the real children.
Ben took his place at the big table, among the other
children. He kept his eyes on his father, who had
betrayed him. Helen said, 'Hello, Ben.' Then Luke:
'Hello, Ben.' Then Jane. Not Paul, who was miserable
that Ben was there again, and took himself off to flump
into a chair and pretend to watch television.
Ben at last said, 'Hello.' His eyes were moving from
face to face: friend or foe?
He ate, watching them. When they went to sit and
watch television, he did, too, copying them for safety,
and looked at the screen because they did.
And so things went back to normal, if that was a
word that could be used.
But Ben did not trust his father; he never trusted him
again. David could not even come near him without
Ben freezing, and backing away, and, if he came too
close, snarling.
When she was sure Ben had recovered, Harriet acted
109
on an idea she had been developing. The garden had
got badly out of hand last summer, and a youth called
John came to help with it. He was unemployed, and
did odd jobs.
For a few days he had cut hedges, dug up a couple
of ailing shrubs, sawed off a dead branch, mowed the
lawn. Ben would not be parted from him. He crouched
at the french doors, waiting for John to arrive; then
followed him around like a puppy. John did not mind
Ben at all. He was a big, shaggy, amiable youth, goodnatured, patient: he treated Ben in a rough-and-ready
way, as if Ben were indeed a puppy that needed
training. 'No, you must sit there now and wait till I've
done.' 'Hold these shears for me, that's right.' 'No, I'm
going home now, you can come to the gate with me.'
Ben sometimes whined and grizzled when John went
off.
Now Harriet went down to a certain cafe - 'Betty's
Caff', as it was known - where she knew he hung out,
and found him there with some mates. This was a gang
of unemployed young men, about ten of them, and
sometimes there were a couple of girls. She did not
bother to explain anything, for by now she knew that
people understood very well - that is, if they weren't
experts, doctors.
She sat among these youths, and said that it would
be two years, perhaps more, before Ben went to school.
He wasn't suitable for ordinary nursery school. She
looked at John deliberately, in the eyes, when she used
the word 'suitable', and he simply nodded. She would
like Ben taken care of during the day. The money
would be good.
110
'You want me up at your house?' John asked, saying
no to this proposition.
'It would be up to you,' said Harriet. 'He likes you,
John. He trusts you.'
He looked at his mates: they consulted each other
with their eyes. Then he nodded.
Now he arrived most mornings about nine, and Ben
went off with him on his motorbike: went exultantly,
laughing, without a look back at his mother, his father,
his brothers and sisters. The understanding was that
Ben should be kept well away from his home until
supper time, but often it was long after that when he
arrived. He had become part of the group of young
unemployed, who hung about on pavements, sat
around in cafes, sometimes did odd jobs, went to the
cinema, rushed about on motorbikes or in borrowed
cars.
The family became a family again. Well, almost.
David came back to sleep in the connubial room.
There was a distance between them. David had made
and now kept this distance because Harriet had hurt
him so badly: she understood this. Harriet informed
him that she was now on the Pill: for both it was a
bleak moment, because of everything they had been,
had stood for, in the past, which had made it impossible for her to be on the Pill. They had felt it deeply
wrong so to tamper with the processes of Nature!
Nature - they now reminded themselves they once felt
- was at some level or other to be relied upon.
Harriet rang up Dorothy and asked her if she would
come for a week, and then begged David to go off with
her on a holiday somewhere. They had not been alone,
ever, since Luke was born. They chose a quiet country
111
hotel, and walked a good deal, and were considerate
with each other. Their hearts ached a good deal; but
then that seemed to be something they must live with.
Sometimes, particularly in their happiest moments,
they could not stop their eyes from filling. But at nights
when she lay in her husband's arms, Harriet knew this
was nothing like the real thing, not like the past.
She said, 'Suppose we do what we said we would I mean, go on having children?'
She felt how his body tensed, felt his anger.
'And so it all never happened?' he asked at last, and
she knew he was curious to hear her: he could not
believe his ears!
'Another Ben wouldn't happen again - why should
it?'
'It's not a question of another Ben,' he remarked at
last, and he was keeping his voice emotionless because
of his anger.
She knew that what he could have assaulted her
with was exactly what she always tried to conceal from
herself, or at least the worst of it: she had dealt the
family a mortal wound when she rescued Ben.
She persisted, 'We could have more children.'
'And the four we have don't count?'
'Perhaps it would bring us all together again, make
things better ...'
He was silent; and against that silence she could
hear how false her words had rung.
At last he enquired, in the same emotionless way,
'And what about Paul?' For it was Paul who was the
most damaged.
'Perhaps he would get over it,' she said hopelessly.
112
'He is not going to get over it, Harriet.' And now his
voice vibrated with what he was suppressing.
She turned away from him, and lay weeping.
When the summer holidays were due, Harriet wrote
careful letters to everyone, explaining that Ben was
hardly ever in the house. She felt unfaithful and
treacherous doing this: but to whom?
Some of them came. Not Molly, or Frederick, who
did not forgive her for bringing Ben back; nor would
they ever, she knew. Her sister Sarah came with Amy
and with Dorothy, who now was Amy's support
against the world. But Amy's brothers and sisters went
to stay with their other cousins, Angela's children, and
the Lovatt children knew they would not have company for the holidays because of Ben. Briefly, Deborah
was there. She had been married and divorced since
they had seen her. She was a spiky, elegant, increasingly witty and desperate girl, who was a good aunt to
the children, in an impulsive unskilled way, with
expensive and unsuitable presents. James was there.
He said several times that the house was like a large
fruit-cake, but this was kindness. There were some
grown-up cousins, at a loose end, and a colleague of
David's.
And where was Ben? One day, Harriet was shopping
in the town, and she heard the roar of a motorbike
behind her, and turned to see a creature like a spaceage jockey, presumably John, crouched low over the
bars, and behind him, clutching tight, a dwarf child:
she saw her son Ben, his mouth open in what seemed
to be a chant or yell of exultation. Ecstatic. She had
never seen him like this. Happy? Was that the word?
She knew he had become a pet or a mascot for this
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group of young men. They treated him roughly, it
seemed to Harriet, even unkindly, calling him Dopey,
Dwarfey, Alien Two, Hobbit, and Gremlin. 'Hey,
Dopey, you're in my way.' 'Go and fetch me a cigarette
from Jack, Hobbit.' But he was happy. In the mornings,
he was at the window waiting for one of them to come
and fetch him; if they failed him, rang up to say they
couldn't make it that day, he was full of rage and
deprivation, and stamped bellowing about the house.
It was all costing a good bit of money. John and his
gang were having good times at the Lovatts' expense.
Not only, these days, at the expense of James, Ben's
grandfather, for David was doing all kinds of extra
work. They did not scruple to put the screws on. 'We'll
take Ben off to the sea, if you like.' 'Oh good, that'd be
lovely." It'll be twenty quid, then - there's petrol.' And
the roaring machines went off to the coast, crowded
with young men and girls, Ben with them. When they
returned him: 'That cost more than we thought.' 'How
much?' 'Another ten quid.'
'It's very nice for him,' a cousin might say, hearing
that Ben was off to the seaside - just as if this were a
normal thing, a little boy being taken off for a treat.
He would come in from a day of safety and enjoyment with John and his mates, where he was teased
and roughed up, but accepted, and stand by the table,
where his family was, all looking at him, their faces
grave and cautious. 'Give me bread,' he would say.
'Give me biscuits.'
'Sit down, Ben,' Luke, or Helen, or lane - never Paul
- would say, in the patient, decent way they had with
him, which hurt Harriet.
He scrambled energetically onto a chair, and set
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himself to be like them. He knew he mustn't talk with
his mouth full, for instance, or eat with his mouth
open. He carefully obeyed such imperatives, the energetic animal movements of his jaws confined behind
closed lips, waiting till his mouth was empty before
saying, 'Ben get down now. Ben wants go to bed.'
He was not in 'the baby's room' now, but the one
nearest to his parents on the landing. (The baby's room
was empty.) They could not lock him in at night: the
sound of a key turning, the slide of a bolt, made him
explode into screaming, kicking rage. But the last thing
before they slept, the other children locked their doors
quietly from inside. This meant Harriet could not go in
to them to see how they were before she went to bed,
or if they were sick. She did not like to ask them not to
lock their doors, nor make a big thing of it by calling
in a locksmith and having special locks fitted, openable
from the outside by an adult with a key. This business
of the children locking themselves in made her feel
excluded, for ever shut out and repudiated by them.
Sometimes she went softly to one of their doors and
whispered to be let in, and she was admitted, and there
was a little festival of kisses and hugs - but they were
thinking of Ben, who might come in ... and several
times he did arrive silently in the doorway and stare
in at this scene, which he could not understand.
Harriet would have liked to lock their door. David
said, trying to joke about it, that he would, one of these
days. More than once she woke to see Ben standing
silently there in the half dark, staring at them. The
shadows from the garden moved on the ceiling, the
spaces of the big room emptied into obscurity, and
there stood this goblin child, half visible. The pressure
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of those inhuman eyes of his had entered her sleep and
woken her.
'Go to sleep, Ben,' she would say gently, keeping her
voice level because of the sharp fear she felt. What was
he thinking as he stood there, watching them sleep?
Did he want to hurt them? Was he experiencing a
misery she could not begin to imagine, because he was
for ever shut out from the ordinariness of this house
and its people? Did he want to put his arms around
her, like the other children, but not know how? But
when she put her arms around him, there was no
response, no warmth; it was as if he did not feel her
touch.
But, after all, he was in the house very little.
'We aren't far off being normal again,' she said to
David. Hopefully. Longing for him to reassure her. But
he only nodded, and did not look at her.
In fact, those two years before Ben went to school
were not too bad: afterwards she looked back on them
gratefully.
In the year Ben was five, Luke and Helen announced
they wanted to go to boarding-school. They were
thirteen and eleven. Of course this went against everything Harriet and David believed in. They said this;
said, too, that they could not afford it. But again the
parents had to face how much the children understood,
how they discussed, and planned - and then' acted.
Luke had already written to Grandfather James, Helen
to Grandmother Molly. Their fees would be paid for.
Luke said, in his reasonable way, 'They agree it
would be better for us. We know you can't help it, but
we don't like Ben.'
This had happened just after Harriet had come down
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one morning, Luke and Helen, Jane and Paul behind
her, to see Ben squatting on the big table, with an
uncooked chicken he had taken from the refrigerator,
which stood open, its contents spilled all over the
f loor. Ben had raided it in some savage fit he could not
control. Grunting with satisfaction, he tore the raw
chicken apart with teeth and hands, pulsing with
barbaric strength. He had looked up over the partly
shredded and dismembered carcass at Harriet, at his
siblings, and snarled. Then Harriet saw the vitality die
down in him as she scolded, 'Naughty Ben,' and he
made himself stand up there on the table, and then
jump down to the floor and face her, the remains of the
chicken dangling in one hand.
'Poor Ben hungry,' he whined.
He had taken to calling himself Poor Ben. He had
heard someone say this? In the group of young men
and their girls, had someone said, 'Poor Ben!' - and he
had then known it fitted him? Was this how he thought
of himself? If so, this was a window into a Ben
concealed from them, and it broke one's heart - broke
Harriet's heart, to be accurate.
The children had not commented at all on this scene.
They had sat themselves around the table for breakfast,
looking at each other, not at her or at Ben.
There was no way Ben could get out of going to
school. She had given up trying to read to him, play
with him, teach him anything: he could not learn. But
she knew the Authorities would never recognize this,
or acknowledge that they did. They would say, and
rightly, that he did know a lot of things that made him
into a part-social being. He knew facts. 'Traffic lights
green - go. Traffic lights red - stop.' Or, 'Half a plate of
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chips, half price big plate of chips.' Or, 'Shut the door,
because it is cold.' He would singsong these truths,
imparted to him presumably by John, looking at Harriet
for confirmation. 'Eat with a spoon, not with fingers!'
'Hold on tight going around corners.' Sometimes Harriet heard him singing these slogans in bed at night,
thinking of the delights of the day to come.
When he was told he must go to school, he said he
would not. Harriet said there was no way around it, to
school he must go. But he could be with John at
weekends, and on holidays. Tantrums. Rages. Despair.
Roars of 'No! No! No!' The whole house resounded
with it.
John was summoned; he arrived in the kitchen with
three of his gang. John, instructed by Harriet, said to
Ben, 'Now listen, mate. You just listen to us. You've
got to go to school.'
'Will you be there?' asked Ben, standing by John's
knee, looking trustfully up at him. Rather, his pose, the
set of his lifted face, said he trusted John, but his eyes
seemed to have shrunk into his head with fear.
'No. But I was at school. When I had to be.' Here the
four young men laughed, for of course they had played
truant, as all their sort did. School was irrelevant to
them. 'I was at school. Rowland here was at school.
Barry and Henry were at school.'
'That's right, that's right,' they all said, playing their
parts.
'And I was at school,' said Harriet. But Ben did not
hear her: she did not count.
It was finally arranged that Harriet would take Ben
to school in the mornings, and that John would be
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responsible for picking him up. Ben would spend the
hours between school's end and bedtime with the gang.
For the sake of the family, thought Harriet; for the
children's sake ... for my sake and David's. Though he
seems to come home later and later.
Meanwhile the family had - as she felt it, saw it fallen apart. Luke and Helen had gone to their respective boarding-schools. In the house were left Jane and
Paul, who were both at the same school Ben was at,
but being in higher classes would not see much of Ben.
Jane continued solid, sensible, quiet, and as able to
save herself as Luke or Helen. She seldom came home
after school, but went to friends. Paul did come home.
He was alone with Harriet, and this, she thought, was
what he wanted, and needed. He was demanding,
shrill, difficult, often in tears. Where was that enchanting, delicious little child, her Paul, she wondered as
he nagged and whined, now a lanky six-year-old, with
great soft blue eyes that often stared at nothing, or
seemed to protest at what he saw. He was too thin. He
had never eaten properly. She brought him home from
school and tried to make him sit down and eat, or she
sat with him, and read, and told him stories. He could
not concentrate. He mooned restlessly about, and daydreamed; then came to Harriet to touch her, or climb
on her lap like a smaller child, never appeased or at
rest or content.
He had not had a mother at the proper time, and that
was the trouble, and they all knew it.
When he heard the roar of the machine that was
bringing Ben back home, Paul might burst into tears, or
bang his head on the wall with frustration.
After Ben had been at school for a month, and there
119
had been no unpleasant news, she asked his teacher
how he was getting on. She heard, to her surprise,
'He's a good little chap. He tries so hard.'
Towards the end of the first term, she was summoned on the telephone by the headmistress, Mrs
Graves. 'Mrs Lovatt, I wonder if you ...'
An efficient woman, she knew what went on in her
school, and that Harriet was the responsible parent of
Luke, Helen, Jane and Paul.
'We all find ourselves at a loss,' said she. 'Ben is
really trying very hard. He doesn't seem to fit in with
the others. It's hard to put one's finger on it.'
Harriet sat waiting - as she had done, it seemed to
her, far too often in Ben's short life - for some kind of
acknowledgement that here might be more than a
difficulty of adjustment.
She remarked, 'He has always been an oddball.'
'The odd man out in the family? Well, there's usually
one, I've often noticed it,' said affable Mrs Graves.
While this surface conversation went on, the sensitized
Harriet was listening for the other, parallel conversation that Ben's existence compelled.
'These young men who come and collect Ben, it's an
unusual arrangement,' smiled Mrs Graves.
'He's an unusual child,' said Harriet, looking hard at
the headmistress, who nodded, not looking at Harriet.
She was frowning, as if some annoying thought were
poking at her, wanting attention, but she did not feel
inclined to give it any.
'Have you ever known a child like Ben before?'
Harriet asked.
This risked the headmistress saying, 'What do you
mean, Mrs Lovatt?' And in fact Mrs Graves did say,
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'What do you mean, Mrs Lovatt?' but quickly, and
then, to stop Harriet telling her, she funked it with 'He
is hyperactive, perhaps? Of course that is a word that I
often feel evades the issue. To say a child is hyperactive does not say very much! But he does have this
extraordinary energy. He can't keep still long - well, a
lot of children can't. His teacher has found him a
rewarding little boy because he does try, but she says
she has to put more effort into him than all the rest put
together ... Well, Mrs Lovatt, I'm glad you came in, it
has been a help.' And as Harriet left, she saw how the
headmistress watched her, with that long, troubled
inspection that held unacknowledged unease, even
horror, which was part of 'the other conversation' - the
real one.
Towards the end of the second term, she was telephoned: Would she come in at once, please? Ben had
hurt someone.
Here it was: this is what she had dreaded. Ben had
suddenly gone berserk and attacked a bigger girl in the
playground. He had pulled her down, so that she fell
heavily on the asphalt, bruising and grazing her legs.
Then he had bitten her, and bent back her arm until it
broke.
'I have spoken to Ben,' said Mrs Graves. 'He doesn't
seem to be remorseful in any way. You might even
think he doesn't know he did it. But at that age - he is
six, after all - he should know what he is doing.'
Harriet took Ben home, leaving Paul to be picked up
later. It was Paul she wanted to take with her: the child
had heard of the attack, and was hysterical, screaming
that Ben would kill him, too. But she had to be alone
with Ben.
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Ben sat on the kitchen table, swinging his legs, eating
bread and jam. He had asked if John would come here
to pick him up. It was John he needed.
Harriet said, 'You hurt poor Mary Jones today. Why
did you do that, Ben?'
He seemed not to hear, but tore lumps of bread off
with his teeth, and then gulped them down.
Harriet sat down close to him, so that he could not
ignore her, and said, 'Ben, do you remember that place
you went to in the van?'
He went rigid. He slowly turned his head and looked
at her. The bread in his hand was trembling: he was
trembling. He remembered, all right! She had never
done this before - had hoped she would never have to.
'Well, do you remember, Ben?'
His eyes had a wild look; he could have jumped
down from the table and run off. He wanted to, but
was glaring around into the corners of the room, at the
windows, up the staircase, as if he might be attacked
from these places.
'Now listen to me, Ben. If you ever, ever, ever
hurt
anyone again, you'll have to go back there.'
She kept her eyes on his, and hoped that he could
not know she was saying inwardly, But I'd never send
him back, never.
He sat shivering, like a wet, cold dog, in spasms, and
he went through a series of movements, unconsciously,
the vestiges of reactions from that time. A hand went
up to shield his face, and he looked through the spread
i f ngers as if this hand could protect him; then the hand
fell, and he turned his head away sharply, pressing the
back of the other hand to his mouth, glaring in terror
over it; he briefly bared his teeth to snarl - but then
122
checked himself; he lifted his chin, and his mouth
opened, and Harriet saw that he could have emitted a
long, animal howl. It was as if she actually heard this
howl, its lonely terror ...
'Did you hear me, Ben?' Harriet said softly.
He slid down off the table, and thumped his way up
the stairs. He left behind him a thin trail of urine. She
heard his door shut, then the bellow of rage and fear he
had been holding back.
She rang John at Betty's Caff. He came at once, by
himself, as she had asked.
He heard the story, and went up to Ben in his room.
Harriet stood outside the door, listening.
'You don't know your own strength, Hobbit, that's
the trouble. It's wrong to hurt people.'
'Are you angry with Ben? Are you going to hurt
Ben?'
'Who's angry?' said John. 'But if you hurt people,
then they hurt you.'
'Is Mary Jones going to hurt me?'
A silence. John was nonplussed.
'Take me to the caff with you? Take me now, take me
away now.'
She heard John looking for a clean pair of dungarees,
heard him persuading Ben into them. She went down
into the kitchen. John came down the stairs with Ben,
who clung to his hand. John gave her a wink and a
thumbs-up sign. He departed with Ben on his motorbike. She went to bring Paul home.
When she asked Dr Brett to arrange an appointment
with a specialist, she said, 'Please don't make me out as
some kind of hysterical idiot.'
She took Ben to London. She left him in the care of
123
Dr Gilly's nurse. This doctor liked to see a child first,
without its parents. It seemed sensible. Perhaps she is
sensible, this one, thought Harriet, sitting by herself
drinking coffee in a little cafe, and then wondered,
What do I mean by that? What am I hoping for, this
time? What she wanted, she decided, was that at last
someone would use the right words, share the burden.
No, she did not expect to be rescued, or even that
anything much could change. She wanted to be
acknowledged, her predicament given its value.
Well, was it likely? In conflict, half full of a longing
for support, half cynical - Well, what do you expect! she returned to find Ben with the nurse in a little room
off the waiting-room. With his back to the wall, Ben
watched the nurse's every movement, as a wary animal
does. When he saw his mother, he rushed to her and
hid behind her.
'Well,' said the nurse tartly, 'there's no need for that,
Ben.'
Harriet told Ben to sit down and wait for her: she
was coming back soon. He got behind a chair and stood
alert, his eyes on the nurse.
Then Harriet was sitting opposite a shrewd professional woman who had been told - Harriet was
convinced - that this was an unreasonable worrying
mother who couldn't handle her fifth child.
Dr Gilly said, 'I'm going to come straight to the point,
Mrs Lovatt. The problem is not with Ben, but with you.
You don't like him very much.'
'Oh my God,' exploded Harriet, 'not again!' She
sounded peevish, whiny. She watched Dr Gilly noting
her reaction. 'Dr Brett told you that,' she said. 'Now
you are saying it.'
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'Well, Mrs Lovatt, would you say it is untrue? First I
must say it is not your fault. And then that it is not
uncommon. We can't choose what will turn up in the
lottery - and that is what having a baby is. Luckily or
unluckily, we can't choose. The first thing you have to
do is not blame yourself.'
'I don't blame myself,' said Harriet. 'Though I don't
expect you to believe it. But it's a bad joke. I feel I've
been blamed for Ben ever since he was born. I feel like
a criminal. I've always been made to feel like a criminal.' During this complaint - shrill, but Harriet could
not change her voice - years of bitterness came pouring
out. Meanwhile Dr Gilly sat looking at her desk. 'It
really is extraordinary! No one has ever said to me, no
one, ever, "How clever of you to have four marvellous
normal clever good-looking children! They are a credit
to you. Well done, Harriet!" Don't you think it is
strange that no one has ever said it? But about Ben I'm a criminal!'
Dr Gilly enquired, after a pause for analysis of what
Harriet had said, 'You resent the fact that Ben isn't
clever, is that it?'
'Oh my God,' said Harriet violently. 'What is the
point!'
The two women eyed each other. Harriet sighed,
letting her violence subside; the doctor was angry, but
not showing it.
'Tell me,' said Harriet, 'are you saying that Ben is a
perfectly normal child in every way? There's nothing
strange about him?'
'He is within the range of normality. He is not very
good at school, I am told, but often slow children catch
up later.'
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'I can't believe it,' said Harriet. 'Look, just do something - oh all right, humour me! Ask the nurse to bring
Ben in here.'
Dr Gilly considered this, then spoke into her
machine.
They heard Ben shouting 'No, no!' and the nurse's
persuasive voice.
The door opened. Ben appeared: he had been pushed
into the room by the nurse. The door shut behind him,
and he backed against it, glaring at the doctor.
He stood with his shoulders hunched forward and
his knees bent, as if about to spring off somewhere. He
was a squat, burly little figure, with a big head, the
yellow stubble of his coarse hair growing from the
double crown of his head into the point low on his
heavy narrow forehead. He had a flattish flaring nose
that turned up. His mouth was fleshy and curly. His
eyes were like lumps of dull stone. For the first time
Harriet thought, But he doesn't look like a six-year-old,
but much older. You could almost take him for a little
man, not a child at all.
The doctor looked at Ben. Harriet watched them
both. The doctor then said, 'All right, Ben, go out
again. Your mother will be with you in a minute.'
Ben stood petrified. Again Dr Gilly spoke into her
machine, the door opened, and Ben was hauled backwards out of sight, snarling.
'Tell me, Dr Gilly, what did you see?'
Dr Gilly's pose was wary, offended; she was calculating the time left to the end of the interview. She did
not answer.
Harriet said, knowing it was no use, but because she
wanted it said, heard: 'He's not human, is he?'
126
Dr Gilly suddenly, unexpectedly, allowed what she
was thinking to express itself. She sat up, sighed
heavily, put her hands to her face and drew them
down, until she sat with her eyes shut, her fingers on
her lips. She was a handsome middle-aged woman, in
full command of her life, but for the flash of a moment
an unlicensed and illegitimate distress showed itself,
and she looked beside herself, even tipsy.
Then she decided to repudiate what Harriet knew
was a moment of truth. She let her hands fall, smiled,
and said jokingly, 'From another planet? Outer space?'
'No. Well, you saw him, didn't you? How do we
know what kinds of people - races, I mean - creatures
different from us, have lived on this planet? In the
past, you know? We don't really know, do we? How do
we know that dwarves or goblins or hobgoblins, that
kind of thing, didn't really live here? And that's why
we tell stories about them? They really existed, once.
. . . Well, how do we know they didn't?'
'You think Ben is a throwback?' enquired Dr Gilly
gravely. She sounded as if quite prepared to entertain
the idea.
'It seems to me obvious,' said Harriet.
Another silence, and Dr Gilly examined her wellkept hands. She sighed. Then she looked up and met
Harriet's eyes with 'If that is so, then what do you
expect me to do about it?'
Harriet insisted, 'I want it said. I want it recognized.
I just can't stand it never being said.'
'Can't you see that it is simply outside my competence? If it is true, that is? Do you want me to give you
a letter to the zoo, "Put this child in a cage"? Or hand
him over to science?'
127
'Oh God,' said Harriet. 'No, of course not.'
Silence.
'Thank you, Dr Gilly,' said Harriet, ending the interview in the regular way. She stood up. 'Would you be
prepared to give me a prescription for a really strong
sedative? There are times when I can't control Ben,
and I have to have something to help me.'
The doctor wrote. Harriet took the bit of paper. She
thanked Dr Gilly. She said goodbye. She went to the
door, and glanced back. On the doctor's face she saw
what she expected: a dark fixed stare that reflected
what the woman was feeling, which was horror at the
alien, rejection by the normal for what was outside the
human limit. Horror of Harriet, who had given birth to
Ben.
She found Ben alone in the little room, backed into
a corner, glaring, unblinking, at the door she came in
by. He was trembling. People in white uniforms, white
coats, in rooms that smelled of chemicals ... Harriet
realized that without meaning it, she had reinforced
her threats. If you behave badly, then ...
He was subdued. He kept close to her; no, not like a
child with its mother, but like a frightened dog.
Every morning now, she gave Ben a dose of the
sedative, which, however, did not have much effect on
him. But she hoped it would keep him damped down
until school ended and he could roar off with John on
the motorbike.
Then it was the end of Ben's first year at school. This
meant that they could all go on, pretending that not
much was wrong, he was just a 'difficult' child. He
wasn't learning anything, but then plenty of children
did not: they put in time at school, and that was all.
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That Christmas, Luke wrote to say he wanted to go
to his grandparents, who were somewhere off the coast
of southern Spain; and Helen went to Grandmother
Molly's house in Oxford.
Dorothy came for Christmas, just three days. She
took Jane back with her: Jane adored the little mongol
child Amy.
Ben spent all his time with John. Harriet and David
- when he was there, but he worked more and more were with Paul through the Christmas holidays. Paul
was even more difficult than Ben. But he was a normal
'disturbed' child, not an alien.
Paul spent hours watching television. He escaped
into it, watching restlessly, moving about as he
watched, and ate, and ate - but never put on weight.
Inside him seemed to be an unappeasable mouth that
said, Feed me, feed me. He craved, every bit of him for what? His mother's arms did not satisfy him. Wars
and riots; killings and hijackings; murders and thefts
and kidnappings
. . . the eighties, the barbarous
eighties were getting into their stride and Paul lay
sprawled in front of the set, or wandered about the
room, eating and watching - being nourished. So it
seemed.
The patterns for the family had been set: and so the
future would be.
Luke always went for his school holidays to Grandfather James, with whom he 'got on' so well. He liked
his Grandmother Jessica, who was great fun, he said.
His Aunt Deborah was fun, too: her attempts and
failures at matrimony were a long-running serial story,
presented comically. Luke was living with the rich,
and thriving; and sometimes James brought him home
129
to visit his parents, for the kindly man was unhappy at
what went on in that misfortuned house, and knew
that Harriet and David yearned for their eldest. They
did visit him at his school for Sports Days; and Luke
sometimes came home for half-terms.
Helen was happy at Molly's house. She lived in the
room her father had once made his real home. She was
old Frederick's favourite. She, too, sometimes came for a
half-term.
Jane had prevailed on Dorothy to come and reason
with Harriet and David, for she wanted to live with
Dorothy and Aunt Sarah and the three healthy cousins
and poor Amy. And so she did. Dorothy brought Jane
home sometimes, and the parents could see that Dorothy had 'talked' to Jane to make her kind to them, and
never, not ever, criticize Ben.
Paul remained at home: he was there much more
than Ben.
David said to Harriet, 'What are we going to do with
Paul?'
'What can we do?'
'He needs treatment of some kind. A psychiatrist ..
'What good is that going to do!'
'He's not learning anything, he's a real mess. He's
worse than Ben! At least Ben is what he is, whatever
that may be, and I don't think I want to know. But
Paul.. .'
'And how are we going to pay for it?'
'I will.'
David now added a part-time job teaching at a
polytechnic to his already heavy load of work, and was
hardly ever at home. If he did come home during the
130
week, it was late at night, and he fell into bed and
slept, exhausted.
Paul was sent to 'talk to someone', as the phrase
goes.
He went nearly every afternoon after school. This
was a success. The psychiatrist was a man of forty,
with a family and a pleasant house. Paul stayed there
for supper, and even went over to play with the
children when he did not actually have an appointment to talk with the doctor.
Sometimes Harriet was alone in that great. house all
day, until Paul came home at about seven to watch the
television - and Ben, too, though his television-watching was different. His attention was held by the screen
unpredictably, and according to no pattern Harriet
could see, usually only for a minute or two.
The two boys hated each other.
Once, Harriet found Paul in a corner of the kitchen,
stretched up on tiptoes, trying to evade Ben's hands,
which were reaching up to his throat. Short powerful,
Ben: Tall spidery Paul - if Ben wanted to, he could kill
Paul. Harriet thought that Ben was trying to
frighten
Paul, but Paul was hysterical. Ben grinned vindictively, full of triumph.
'Ben,' said Harriet. 'Ben - down.' As if to a
dog,
warning it. 'Down, Ben, down.'
He turned sharply, saw her, dropped his hands. She
put into her eyes the threat she had already used, her
power over him: his memories of the past.
He bared his teeth and snarled.
Paul screamed, his terror bursting out of him. He
raced up the stairs, slipping and falling, to get away
from the horror that was Ben.
131
'If you ever do that again ...' threatened Harriet. Ben
went slowly to the big table and sat down. He was
thinking, so she believed. 'If you ever do that again,
Ben . . .' He raised his eyes and looked at her. He was
calculating, she could see. But what? Those cold,
inhuman eyes ... What did he see? People assumed he
saw what they did, that he saw a human world. But
perhaps his senses accommodated quite different facts,
data. How could anyone know? What was he thinking?
How did he see himself?
'Poor Ben,' he would sometimes still say.
Harriet did not tell David about this incident. She
knew he was at the edge of what he could stand. And
what was she going to say? 'Ben tried to kill Paul
today!' This was a long way beyond what they had set
for themselves, outside the permissible. Besides, she
did not believe Ben was trying to kill Paul: he was
demonstrating what he could do if he wanted to.
She told Paul that Ben was absolutely not trying to
hurt him, only to frighten him. She thought Paul
believed her.
Two years before Ben was due to leave the school
where he learned nothing, but at least had not harmed
anyone, John came to say he was departing from their
lives. He had been granted a place in a job-training
scheme in Manchester. He, and three of his mates.
Ben was there, listening. He had been told by John
already, in Betty's Caff. But he had not taken it in. John
had come up on purpose to say this to Harriet, with
Ben present, so that Ben could accept it.
'Why can't I come, too?' demanded Ben.
'Because you can't, mate. But when I come and visit
my mother and father, I'll come and see you.'
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Ben insisted, 'But why can't I come with you?'
'Because I'll be at school, too. Not here. I'll be far
away. Far, far away.'
Ben stiffened. He assumed his rigid crouching pose,
i fsts held out. He ground his teeth together, his eyes
malevolent.
'Ben,' said Harriet, using her special voice. 'Ben, stop
it.
'Come on now, Hobbit,' said John, uneasy but kind.
'I can't help it. I've got to get away from home some
time, haven't IT
'Is Barry going? Is Rowland going? Is Henry?'
'Yes, all four of us.'
Suddenly, Ben rushed out into the garden, where he
began kicking at a tree trunk, letting out squeals of
rage.
'Better the tree than me,' said John.
'Or me,' said Harriet.
'I'm sorry,' said John. 'But there it is.'
'I cannot imagine what we would have done without
you,' said Harriet.
He nodded, knowing it was true. And so John left
their lives, for good. Ben had been with him almost
every day of his life since he was rescued from the
Institution.
Ben took it hard. At first, he did not believe it. When
Harriet arrived to fetch him and, sometimes, Paul from
school, he would be at the school gates, staring down
the road where John had appeared gloriously on his
motorbike. Reluctantly he went home with her, sitting
in the corner of the back seat opposite from Paul, if
Paul was not at the psychiatrist's, and his eyes
searched the streets for signs of his lost friends. More
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than once, when he was not anywhere in the house,
Harriet found him in Betty's Caff, sitting isolated at a
table, his eyes on the door, where they might appear.
In the street one morning, a minor member of John's
gang was standing outside a shop-window, and Ben,
crowing with pleasure, rushed to him: but the youth
said casually, 'Hi, it's Dumbo. Hello, Dopey,' and
turned away. Ben stood transfixed with disbelief, his
mouth open, as if he had received a blow across it. It
took him a long time to understand. As soon as he got
home with Harriet and Paul, he would be off again,
running into the centre of the town. She did not follow
him. He would come back! He had nowhere else; and
she was always pleased to have Paul alone with her if Paul was there.
Once, Ben came thumping into the house, with his
heavy run, and dived under the big table. A policewoman appeared and said to Harriet, 'Where's that
child? Is he all right?'
'He's under the table,' said Harriet.
'Under the ... but what for? I only wanted to make
sure he wasn't lost. How old is he?'
'Older than he looks,' said Harriet. 'Come out, Ben,
it's all right.'
He would not come out: he was on all fours, facing
where the policewoman stood, watching her neat shiny
black shoes. He was remembering how once someone
in a car had captured him and taken him away:
uniforms, the aroma of officialdom.
'Well,' said the policewoman. 'Anyone'd think I was a
child-snatcher! I shouldn't let him go running around
like that. He might get himself kidnapped.'
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'No such luck,' said Harriet, every inch the jolly
coping mum. 'More likely he'd kidnap them.'
'It's like that, is it?'
And the policewoman departed, laughing.
David and Harriet lay side by side in the connubial
bed, lights out, the house still. Two rooms down, Ben
slept - they hoped. Four rooms down, at the end of the
passage, Paul slept behind a self-locked door. It was
late, and Harriet knew David would be asleep in a
minute or two. They lay with a space between them.
But it was no longer a space full of anger. Harriet knew
that he was too permanently exhausted to be angry.
Anyway, he had decided not to be angry: it was killing
him. She always knew what he was thinking: he often
answered, aloud, to her thoughts.
They sometimes made love, but she felt, and knew he
did, that the ghosts of young Harriet and young
David entwined and kissed.
It was as if the strain of her life had stripped off her
a layer of flesh - not real flesh, but perhaps metaphysical substance, and invisible, unsuspected, until it had
gone. And David, working as he did, had lost the self
that was the family man. His efforts had made him
successful in his firm, then gained him a much better
job in another. But that now was where his centre was:
events have their own logic. He was now the sort of
man he had once decided never to be. James no longer
supported this family; he only paid for Luke. The
candour, the openness that had come from David's
stubborn trust in himself had been overlaid by his new
self-confidence. Harriet knew that if she were to meet
David now, for the first time, she would think him
hard. But he was not hard. The rock she felt there in
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him was endurance. He knew how to stick things out.
They were still alike.
Tomorrow, which was a Saturday, David was going
to a cricket match at Luke's school. Harriet was visiting
Helen at her school: Helen was in a play. Dorothy was
coming in the morning to let the two escape for the
weekend. Jane would not be with her, but at a party at
a school friend's house she did not want to miss.
Paul was going with his father to visit his brother.
Ben would be alone with Dorothy, who had not seen
him for a year.
Harriet was not surprised when David said, 'Do you
think Dorothy understands how much older Ben is
than he looks?'
'Should we warn her?'
'But she understands everything, after about five
minutes.'
A silence. Harriet knew David was nearly asleep. He
roused himself to say, 'Harriet, has it occurred to you
that in a couple of years' time Ben will be adolescent?
He'll be a sexual being?'
'Yes, it has. But he's not on the same clock as we
are.'
'Presumably those people of his had something like
an adolescence?'
'How do we know? Perhaps they weren't as sexual
as we are. Someone said we're oversexed - who? Yes,
it was Bernard Shaw.'
'All the same, the thought of Ben sexual scares me.'
'He hasn't hurt anyone for a long time.'
After that weekend Dorothy said to Harriet, 'I
wonder if Ben ever asks himself why he is so different
from us.'
136
'How do we know? I've never known what he's
thinking.'
'Perhaps he thinks there's more of his kind
somewhere.'
'Perhaps he does.'
'Provided it's not a female of the species!'
'Ben makes you think - all those different people
who lived on the earth once - they must be in us
somewhere.'
'All ready to pop up! But perhaps we simply don't
notice them when they do,' said Dorothy.
'Because we don't want to,' said Harriet.
'I certainly don't want to,' said Dorothy. 'Not after
seeing Ben ... Harriet, do you and David realize that
Ben isn't a child any longer? We treat him like one,
but...'
Those two years before Ben could go to the big
school were bad for him. He was lonely, but did he
know he was? Harriet was very lonely, and knew she
was...
Like Paul, when he was there, Ben now went at once
to the television when he came in from school. He
sometimes watched from four in the afternoon until
nine or ten at night. He did not seem to like one
programme more than another. He did not understand
that some programmes were for children, and others
for grown-ups.
'What was the story of that film, Ben?'
'Story.' He tried the word, his thick clumsy voice
tentative. And his eyes were on her face, to discover
what she wanted.
'What happened in that film, the one you've just
seen?'
137
'Big cars,' he would say. 'A motorbike. That girl
crying. Car chased the man.'
Once, to see if Ben could learn from Paul, she said
to Paul, 'What was the story of that film?'
'It was about bank robbers, wasn't it?' said Paul, full
of scorn for stupid Ben, who was listening, his eyes
moving from his mother's face to his brother's. 'They
planned to rob the bank by tunnelling. They nearly
reached the vault, but the police caught them in a trap.
They went to prison, but most of them escaped. Two
of them were shot by the police.'
Ben had listened carefully.
'Tell me the story of the film, Ben?'
'Bank robbers,' said Ben. And repeated what Paul
had said, stumbling as he reached for exactly the same
words.
'But that was only because I told him,' said Paul.
Ben's eyes flared, but went cold as he told himself Harriet presumed - 'I mustn't hurt anyone. If I do,
they'll take me to that place.' Harriet knew everything
Paul was thinking, feeling. But Ben - she had to try to
guess.
Could Paul perhaps teach Ben, without either of
them knowing it?
She would read a story to them both, and ask Paul to
repeat the story. Then Ben copied Paul. But inside a
few minutes he had forgotten it.
She played games like snakes-and-ladders and ludo
with Paul, Ben watching; and then, when Paul was
with his other family, she invited Ben to try. But he
could not get the hang of the games.
Yet certain films he would watch over and over
again and never tire of them. They had hired a video.
138
He loved musicals: The Sound of Music, West Side
Story, Oklahoma!, Cats.
'And now she is going to sing,' Ben told her when
she asked 'What is happening now, Ben?'
Or, 'They are going to dance around, and then she
will sing.' Or, 'They are going to hurt that girl.' 'The
girl ran away. Now it is a party.'
But he could not tell her the story of the film.
'Sing me that tune, Ben. Sing it to me and Paul.
But he could not. He loved the tune, but could bring
out only a rough, tuneless roar.
Harriet found Paul teasing Ben: asking him to sing a
tune, then taunting him. Harriet saw fury blaze in
Ben's eyes, and told Paul not to do that ever again.
'Why not?' cried Paul. 'Why not? It's always Ben,
Ben, Ben ...' He flailed his arms at Ben. Ben's eyes
glittered. He was about to spring on Paul ...
'Ben,' warned Harriet.
It seemed to her that these efforts she made to
humanize him drove him away into himself, where he
. . . but what? - remembered? - dreamed of? - his own
kind.
Once, when she knew he was in the house, but could
not find him, she went up from floor to floor looking
into the rooms. The first floor, which was still inhabited, with David and herself, Ben and Paul, though
three of the rooms were empty, their beds standing
ready, spread with fresh pillows and laundered duvets.
The second floor, with its clean empty rooms. The
third floor: how long since children's voices, their
laughter, filled that floor and spilled out of the open
windows all over the garden? But Ben was not in any
of those rooms. She went on quietly up to the attic.
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The door was open. From the high skylight fell a
distorted rectangle of light, and in it stood Ben, staring
up at dim sunlight. She could not make out what he
wanted, what he felt ... He heard her and then she
saw the Ben that this life he had to lead kept subdued:
in one leap he had reached the dark at the edges of the
eaves and vanished. All she could see was the obscurities of an attic that seemed boundless. She could hear
nothing. He was crouching there, staring out at her ...
She felt the hair on her head lift, felt cold chills instinctive, for she did not fear him with her mind.
She was rigid with terror.
'Ben,' she said softly, though her voice shook. 'Ben
. . .' putting into the word her human claim on him,
and on this wild dangerous attic where he had gone
back into a far-away past that did not know human
beings.
No reply. Nothing. A blotch of shadow momentarily
dimmed the thin dirty light under the skylight: a bird
had passed, on its way from one tree to another.
She went downstairs, and sat cold and lonely in the
kitchen, drinking hot tea.
Just before Ben went to the local secondary modern
school, the only school of course that would have him,
there was a summer holiday, almost like those in the
past. People had written each other, had rung: 'Those
poor people, let's go there, at least for a week. . .' Poor
David . . . always that, Harriet knew. Sometimes,
rarely, poor Harriet ... More often, irresponsible Harriet, selfish Harriet, crazy Harriet ...
Who had not let Ben be murdered, she
defended
herself fiercely, in thought, never aloud. By everything
they - the society she belonged to - stood for, believed
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in, she had had no alternative but to bring Ben back
from that place. But because she had, and saved him
from murder, she had destroyed her family. Had
harmed her life ... David's ... Luke's, Helen's, Jane's . . .
and Paul's. Paul, the worst.
Her thoughts circled in this groove.
David kept saying she should simply not have gone
up there ... but how could she not have gone, being
Harriet? And if she had not, she believed David would
have.
A scapegoat. She was the scapegoat - Harriet, the
destroyer of her family.
But another layer of thoughts, or feelings, ran deeper.
She said to David, 'We are being punished, that's all.'
'What for?' he demanded, already on guard because
there was a tone in her voice he hated.
'For presuming. For thinking we could be
happy.
Happy because we decided we would be.'
'Rubbish,' he said. Angry: this Harriet made him
angry. 'It was chance. Anyone could have got Ben. It
was a chance gene, that's all.'
'I don't think so,' she stubbornly held on. 'We were
going to be happy! No one else is, or I never seem to
meet them, but we were going to be. And so down
came the thunderbolt.'
'Stop it, Harriet! Don't you know where that thought
leads? Pogroms and punishments, witch-burnings and
angry gods - !' He was shouting at her.
'And scapegoats,' said Harriet. 'Don't forget the
scapegoats.'
'Vindictive gods, from thousands of years ago,' he
hotly contended, disturbed to his depths, she could
141
see. 'Punishing gods, distributing punishments for
insubordination ...'
'But who were we to decide we were going to be this
or that?'
'Who? We did. Harriet and David. We took the
responsibility for what we believed in, and we did it.
Then - bad luck. That's all. We could easily have
succeeded. We could have had just what we planned.
Eight children in this house and everyone happy ...
Well, as far as possible.'
'And who paid for it? James. And Dorothy, in a
different way ... No, I'm just stating facts, David, not
criticizing you.'
But this had long ago ceased to be a sore point with
David. He said: 'James and Jessica have so much money
they wouldn't have missed three times as much.
Anyway, they adored doing it. And Dorothy - she
complained about being used, but she's been Amy's
nursemaid ever since she got fed up with us.'
'We just wanted to be better than everyone else,
that's all. We thought we were.'
'No, that's how you are twisting it around now. All
we wanted was - to be ourselves.'
'Oh, that's all,' said Harriet airily, spitefully. 'That's
all.'
'Yes. Don't do it, Harriet, stop it . . . Well, if you
won't, if you have to, then leave me out. I'm not going
to be dragged back to the Middle Ages.'
'Is that where we've been dragged back to?'
Molly and Frederick came, bringing Helen. They had
not, would not, forgive Harriet, but Helen must be
considered. She was doing well at school, an attractive,
self-sufficient girl of sixteen. But cool, distant.
142
James brought Luke, eighteen years old, a handsome
boy, quiet, reliable and steady. He was going to build
boats, like his grandfather. He was a watcher, an
observer, like his father.
Dorothy came with Jane, fourteen. Non-academic,
but 'none the worse for that', as Dorothy insisted. 'I
could never pass an exam.' The 'and look at me' was
unspoken; but Dorothy would challenge them all
simply by her presence. Which was less substantial
than it had been. She was rather thin these days, and
sat about a good deal. Paul, eleven years old, was
histrionic, hysterical, always demanding attention. He
talked a lot about his new school, a day-school, which
he hated. He wanted to know why he couldn't go to
boarding-school like all the others. David said, forestalling James with a proud look, that he would pay for
it.
'Surely it is time you sold this house,' Molly said,
and what she was saying to her selfish daughter-in-law
was'And then my son can stop killing himself working
too hard for you.'
David came in quickly to support Harriet, 'I agree
with Harriet, we shouldn't sell the house yet.'
'Well, what do you think is going to change?' asked
Molly, cold. 'Ben certainly isn't.'
But privately David said something else. He would
like the house sold.
'It's being with Ben in a small house, just the thought
of it,' said Harriet.
'It wouldn't have to be a small house. But does it
have to be the size of a hotel?'
David knew that even now, though it was foolish,
143
i.
she could not finally give up her dreams of the old life
coming back.
Then that holiday was gone. A success, on the
whole, for everyone tried hard. Except for Molly - so
Harriet saw it. But it was sad for both parents. They
had to sit listening to talk about people they had not
met, only heard of. Luke and Helen visited families of
school friends. And these people could never be asked
here.
In September of the year Ben became eleven, he
went to the big school. It was 1986.
Harriet prepared herself for the telephone call that
must come from the headmaster. It would be, she
thought, towards the end of the first term. The new
school would have been sent a report on Ben, from the
headmistress who had so consistently refused to
acknowledge that there was anything remarkable about
him. 'Ben Lovatt is not an academic child, but . . .' But
what? 'He tries hard.' Would that have been it? But he
had long ago stopped trying to understand what he
was taught, could hardly read or write, more than his
name. He still tried to fit in, to copy others.
There was no telephone call, no letter. Ben, whom
she examined for bruises every evening when he came
home, seemed to have entered the tough and often
brutal world of the secondary school without
difficulty.
'Do you like this school, Ben?'
'Yes.'
'Better than the other school?'
'Yes.'
As everyone knows, all these schools have a layer,
like a sediment, of the uneducable, the unassimilable,
144
the hopeless, who move up the school from class to
class, waiting for the happy moment when they can
leave. And, more often than not, they are truants, to
the relief of their teachers. Ben had at once become
one of these.
Some weeks after he went to the big school, he
brought home a large, shaggy dark youth, full of easy
good nature. Harriet thought, John! And then, But he
must be John's brother! No; Ben had been drawn to
this boy, it was clear, first of all because of his memories of that happy time with John. But his name was
Derek, and he was fifteen, soon to leave school. Why
did he put up with Ben, years younger than he was?
Harriet watched the two as they helped themselves to
food from the refrigerator, made themselves tea, sat in
front of the television, talking more than they watched.
In fact, Ben seemed older than Derek. They ignored
her. Just as when Ben was the mascot, the pet of the
gang of youths, John's gang, and had seemed to see
only John, now his attention was for Derek. And, soon,
for Billy, for Elvis, and for Vic, who came in a gang
after school and sat around and fed themselves from
the refrigerator.
Why did these big boys like Ben?
She would look at them, from the stairs perhaps, as
she came down into the living-room, a group of youths,
large, or thin, or plump, dark, fair, or redheaded - and
among them Ben, squat, powerful, heavy-shouldered,
with his bristly yellow hair growing in that strange
- and she
pattern, with his watchful, alien eyes
thought, But he's not really younger than they are! He's
much shorter, yes. But it almost seems that he dominates them. When they sat around the big family table,
145
talking in their style, which was loud, raucous, jeering,
jokey, they were always looking at Ben. Yet he spoke
very little. When he did say something, it was never
much more than Yes, or No. Take this! Get that! Give
me - whatever it was, a sandwich, a bottle of Coke.
And he watched them carefully all the time. He was
the boss of this gang, whether they knew it or not.
They were a bunch of gangly, spotty, uncertain
adolescents; he was a young adult. She had to conclude
this finally, though for a while she believed that these
poor children, who stayed together because they were
found stupid, awkward, and unable to match up to
their contemporaries, liked Ben because he was even
clumsier and more inarticulate than they. No! She
discovered that 'Ben Lovatt's gang' was the most
envied in the school, and a lot of boys, not only the
truants and drop-outs, wanted to be part of it.
Harriet watched Ben with his followers and tried to
imagine him among a group of his own kind, squatting
in the mouth of a cave around roaring flames. Or a
settlement of huts in a thick forest? No, Ben's people
were at home under the earth, she was sure, deep
underground in black caverns lit by torches - that was
more like it. Probably those peculiar eyes of his were
adapted for quite different conditions of light.
She often sat in the kitchen, by herself, when they
were across the low wall in the living-room, watching
the box. They might sprawl there for hours, all afternoon and evening. They made tea, raided the refrigerator, went out to fetch pies, or chips, or pizzas. They
did not seem to mind what they watched; they liked
the afternoon soap operas, did not turn off the children's programmes; but best of all they enjoyed the
146
bloody fare of the evening. Shootings and killings and
tortures and fighting: this is what fed them. She
watched them watching - but it was more as if they
were actually part of the stories on the screen. They
were unconsciously tensing and flexing, faces grinning, or triumphant or cruel; and they let out groans or
sighs or yells of excitement: 'That's it, do it!' 'Carve
him up!' 'Kill him, slice him!' And the moans of
excited participation as the bullets poured into a body,
as blood spurted, as the tortured victim screamed.
These days the local newspapers were full of news
of muggings, hold-ups, break-ins. Sometimes this gang,
Ben among them, did not come into the Lovatts' house
for a whole day, two days, three.
'Where have you been, Ben?'
He replied indifferently, 'Been with my friends.'
'Yes, but where?'
'Been around.'
In the park, in a cafe, in the cinema, and, when they
could borrow (or steal?) motorbikes, off to some seaside
town.
She thought of ringing the headmaster, but then:
What is the point? If I were in his place, I'd be relieved
they took themselves off.
The police? Ben in the hands of the police?
The gang always seemed to have plenty of money.
More than once, dissatisfied with what they found in
the refrigerator, they brought in feasts of food, and ate
all evening. Derek (never Ben!) would offer her some.
'Like a bit of take-away, love?'
And she accepted, but sat apart from them, for she
knew they would not want her too close.
There were rapes, too, among those news items ...
147
She examined those faces, trying to match them with
what she had read. Ordinary young men's faces; they
all seemed older than fifteen, sixteen. Derek had a
foolish look to him: at ugly moments on the screen he
laughed a lot in a weak excitable way. Elvis was a lean,
sharp blond youth, very polite, but a nasty customer,
she thought, with eyes as cold as Ben's. Billy was a
hulk, stupid, with aggression in every movement. He
would get so lost in the violence on the box that he
would jump to his feet and seem almost to disappear
into the screen - and then the others jeered at him, and
he came to himself and sat down. He scared her. They
all did. But, she thought, they weren't all that intelligent. Perhaps Elvis was ... If they were stealing (or
worse), then who planned it all, and looked after them?
Ben? 'He does not know his own strength.' That
formula had gone with him through school. How did
he control the rages that she knew could overcome
him? She was always covertly on the watch for cuts,
bruises, wounds. All had them, but nothing very bad.
One morning, she came down the stairs to find Ben
eating breakfast with Derek. That time she said
nothing, but knew she could expect more. Soon she
found six of them at breakfast: she had heard them,
very late, creep upstairs and find beds for themselves.
She stood by the table, looked at them bravely, ready
to face them out, and said, 'You aren't just to sleep
here, any time you feel like it.' They kept their heads
down and went on eating.
'I mean it,' she insisted.
Derek, said, laughing, intending to sound insolent,
'Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry I'm sure. But we thought you
wouldn't mind.'
148
'I do mind,' she said.
'It's a big house,' said Billy the lout, the one she was
most afraid of. He did not look at her, but crammed
food into his mouth, and made a noise eating.
'It's not your house,' said Harriet.
'One day we'll take it away from you,' said Elvis,
laughing loudly.
'Oh, perhaps you will, yes.'
They all made 'revolutionary' remarks like this,
when they remembered.
'Come the revolution, we'll . . .' 'We'll kill all the
rich shits and then . . .' 'There's one law for the rich,
and one for the poor, everybody knows that.' They
would say these things amiably, with that air of repletion people use when copying what others do; when
they are part of a popular mood or movement.
David came back from work late, these days, and
sometimes did not come at all. He stayed with one of
the people he worked with. It happened that he arrived
early one night and found the gang, nine or ten of
them, watching television, with beer cans, cartons of
take-away Chinese, papers that had held fish and
chips, all over the floor.
He said, 'Clear that mess up.'
They slowly got to their feet and cleared it up. He
was a man: the man of the house. Ben cleared up with
them.
'That's enough,' said David. 'And now go home, all
of you.'
They trailed off, and Ben went with them. Neither
Harriet nor David said anything to stop him.
They had not been alone together for some time.
Weeks, she thought. He wanted to say something, but
149
was afraid to - afraid of arousing that dangerous anger
of his?
'Can't you see what is going to happen?' he finally
asked, sitting down with a plate of whatever he could i f
nd in the refrigerator.
'You mean, they are going to be here more often?'
'Yes, that's what I mean. Can't you see we should
sell this place?'
'Yes, I know we should,' she said quietly, but he
mistook her tone.
'For God's sake, Harriet, what can you be waiting
for? It's crazy . . .'
'The only thing I can think of now is that the
children might be pleased we kept it.'
'We have no children, Harriet. Or, rather, I have no
children. You have one child.'
She felt that he would not be saying this if he were
here more often. She said, 'There is something you
aren't seeing, David.'
'And what's that?'
'Ben will leave. They'll all be off, and Ben will go
with them.'
He considered this; considered her, his jaws moving
slowly as he ate. He looked very tired. He was also
looking much older than he was, could easily be taken
as sixty, rather than fifty. He was a grey, rather stooped,
shadowy man, with a strained look, and a wary glance
that expected trouble. This was what he was directing
at her now.
'Why? They can come here any time they like, do
what they like, help themselves to food.'
'It's not exciting enough for them, that's why. I think
150
they'll just drift off one day to London, or some big
town. They went off for five days last week.'
'And Ben will go with them?'
'Ben will go with them.'
'And you won't go after him and bring him back?'
She did not reply. This was unfair, and he must
know it; after a moment or two, he said, 'Sorry. I'm so
tired I don't know whether I'm coming or going.'
'When he's gone, perhaps we could go and have a
holiday together somewhere.'
'Well, perhaps we could.' This sounded as if he
might even believe it, hope for it.
Later they lay side by side, not touching, and talked
practically about arrangements for visiting Jane at her
school. And there was Paul, at his, with a Parents'
Visiting Day.
They were alone in the big room where all the
children but Ben had been born. Above them the
emptiness of the upper floors, and the attic. Downstairs, the empty living-room and kitchen. They had
locked the doors. If Ben decided to come home that
night, he would have to ring.
She said, 'With Ben gone, we could sell this and buy
some sensible house somewhere. Perhaps the children
would enjoy coming to visit if he wasn't there.'
No reply: David was asleep.
Soon after that, Ben and the others went off again for
some days. She saw them on the television. There was a
riot in North London. 'Trouble' had been forecast.
They were not among those throwing bricks, lumps of
iron, stones, but stood in a group at one side, leering
and jeering and shouting encouragement.
Next day they returned, but did not settle down to
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watching television. They were restless, and went off
again. Next morning the news was that a small shop
had been broken into, one that had a post-office
counter in it. About four hundred pounds had been
taken. The shopkeeper had been bound and gagged.
The postmistress was beaten up and left unconscious.
At about seven that night they came in. Except for
Ben, they were full of excitement and achievement.
When they saw her, they exchanged glances, enjoying
the secret she did not share. She saw them pull out
wads of notes, fingering them, pushing them back into
pockets. If she were the police, she would be suspicious on the strength of their elation, their hectic faces.
Ben was not fevered, like the others. He was as he
always was. You could think he had not been part of whatever it was. But he had been there at the riot, she
had seen him.
She tried: 'I saw you lot on the television, you were
at the Whitestone Estates.'
'Oh yeah, we were there,' boasted Billy.
'That was us,' said Derek, giving himself thumbs-up
approval, and Elvis looked sharp and knowing. Some
others with them, who came sometimes, not regulars,
looked pleased.
A few days later, she remarked, 'I think you lot ought
to know that this house is going to be sold - not at
once, but quite soon.'
She was watching Ben particularly, but while he did
turn his eyes on her, and - she supposed - took the
news in, he said nothing.
'So you're going to sell, then?' said Derek, she felt as
much for politeness as for anything.
She waited for Ben to mention it, but he did not.
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Was his identification with this gang of his now so
great that he did not think of this as his home?
She remarked to him, when he was out of earshot of
the others, 'Ben, if for some reason you can't find me
here, I'm going to give you an address where you can
always reach me.' As she spoke, she felt that David
was watching her satirically, disapprovingly. 'All
right,' she said silently to the invisible David, 'but I
know you would do the same, if I didn't ... That is the
kind of person we are, and there's nothing we can do
about it, for better or worse.'
Ben took the sheet of paper on which she had written
her name, Harriet Lovatt, care of Molly and Frederick
Burke and their Oxford address, which did give her a
certain spiteful pleasure. But she found the sheet of
paper lying forgotten or unregarded on the floor of his
room, and did not try again.
It was spring, then summer, and they came less
often, sometimes not for days at a time. Derek had
acquired a motorbike.
Now, whenever she heard of a break-in, or a mugging, or a rape anywhere, she blamed them; but thought
she was unjust. They could not be blamed for everything! Meanwhile, she was longing for them to leave.
She was a ferment of need to start a new life. She
wanted to be done with this unhappy house, and the
thoughts that went with it.
But they did come, sometimes. As if they had not
been absent for so long, saying nothing about where,
they would drift into the living-room, and sit themselves around the set, four or five of them, sometimes
as many as ten or eleven. They did not now raid the
refrigerator: there was very little in it these days. They
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brought in enormous quantities of a variety of foodstuffs that originated in a dozen countries. Pizzas, and
quiches; Chinese food, and Indian; pita bread filled
with salad; tacos, tortillas, samosas, chili con came;
pies and pasties and sandwiches. These were the
conventional and hidebound English, were they? Not
prepared to eat anything but what their parents knew!
It did not seem to matter to them what they ate,
provided there was a lot of it, and they might strew
crumbs and crusts and cartons about, and not have to
clean anything up.
She tidied up after them and thought: It's not for
long.
She would sit by herself at the big table while they
sprawled about on the other side of the low wall, and
the television noises made a counter-current to their
loud, noisy, rancorous voices - the voices of an alienated, non-comprehending, hostile tribe.
The expanse of the table soothed her. When first
bought, as a discarded butcher's table, it had had a
rough, much-cut-about surface, but it had been planed
down, and at that stage of its life had shown the clean
creamy white of the new layer of wood. She and David
had waxed it. Since then, thousands of hands, fingers,
sleeves, the bare forearms of summer, the cheeks of
children who had fallen forward asleep sitting on
adults' laps, the plump feet of toddlers held up to walk
there, everyone applauding: all this, the smoothings
and caressings of twenty years, had given the wide
board - it was all of a piece, cut long ago from some
gigantic oak - a gleaming silken surface, so smooth
i f ngers skated over it. Beneath this skin the knots and
whorls lay submerged, their pattern known intimately
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to her. The skin had been scarred, though. Here was a
brown half-circle where Dorothy had set down a too
hot saucepan and, angry with herself, had snatched it
up. There was a curving black weal, but Harriet could
not remember what had made it. If you looked at the
table from a certain angle, it had areas of tiny dimples
or dents, where trivets had been set to keep the heat of
dishes off the precious surface.
When she leaned forward, she could see herself in
the gleam - dully, but enough to make her lean back
again, out of sight. She looked like David: old. No one
would say she was forty-five. But it was not the
ordinary ageing of grey hair, tired skin: invisible substance had been leached from her; she had been
drained of some ingredient that everyone took for
granted, which was like a layer of fat but was not
material.
Leaning back where she could not see her blurry
image, she imagined how, once, this table had been set
for feasts and enjoyment, for - family life. She recreated the scenes of twenty, fifteen, twelve, ten years
ago, the stages of the Lovatt board, first David and
herself, brave innocents, with his parents, and Dorothy, and her sisters ... then the babies appearing, and
becoming small children ... new babies . . . twenty
people, thirty, had crowded around this gleaming
surface and been mirrored in it, they had added other
tables to the ends, broadened it with planks set on
trestles . . . she saw the table lengthen, and widen, and
the faces mass around it, always smiling faces, for this
dream could not accommodate criticism or discord.
And the babies . . . the children . . . she heard the
laughter of small children, their voices; and then the
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0
wide shine of the table seemed to darken, and there
was Ben, the alien, the destroyer. She turned her head
cautiously, afraid to alert in him senses she was sure
he possessed, and saw him there, in his chair. He sat
apart from the others, always apart; and, as always, his
eyes were on others' faces, observing. Cold eyes? She
had always thought them cold; but what did they see?
Thoughtful? One could believe him thinking, taking in
data from what he saw and arranging it - but according
to inner patterns neither she nor anyone else could
guess at. Compared with the raw and unfinished
youths, he was a mature being. Finished. Complete.
She felt she was looking, though him, at a race that
reached its apex thousands and thousands of years
before humanity, whatever that meant, took this stage.
Did Ben's people live in caves underground while the
ice age ground overhead, eating fish from dark subterranean rivers, or sneaking up into the bitter snow to
snare a bear, or a bird - or even people, her (Harriet's)
ancestors? Did his people rape the females of humanity's forebears? Thus making new races, which had
l fourished and departed, but perhaps had left their
seeds in the human matrix, here and there, to appear
again, as Ben had? (And perhaps Ben's genes were
already in some foetus struggling to be born?)
Did he feel her eyes on him, as a human would? He
sometimes looked at her while she looked at him - not
often, but it did happen that his eyes met hers. She
would put into her gaze these speculations, these
queries, her need, her passion to know more about him
- whom, after all, she had given birth to, had carried
for eight months, though it had nearly killed her - but
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he did not feel the questions she was asking. Indifferently, casually, he looked away again, and his eyes
went to the faces of his mates, his followers.
And saw - what?
Did he ever remember now that she - his mother,
but what did that mean to him? - had found him in
that place, and brought him home? Had found him a
poor creature half dead in a strait-jacket? Did he know
that because she had brought him home, this house
had emptied itself, and everyone had gone away,
leaving her alone?
Around and around and around: if I had let him die,
then all of us, so many people, would have been happy,
but I could not do it, and therefore ...
And what would happen to Ben now? He already
knew about the half-derelict buildings, the caves and
caverns and shelters of the big cities where people
lived who could not find a place in ordinary homes
and houses: he must do, for where else could he have
been during the periods of days, or weeks, when he
was gone from home? Soon, if he was often enough
part of great crowds, part of the element looking for
excitement in riots, street fights, he and his friends
would be known to the police. He was not someone
easily overlooked ... yet why did she say that? Everyone in authority had not been seeing Ben ever since he
was born ... When she saw him on television in that
crowd, he had worn a jacket with its collar up, and a
scarf, and was like a younger brother, perhaps of Derek.
He seemed a stout schoolboy. Had he put on those
clothes to disguise himself? Did that mean that he
knew how he looked? How did he see himself?
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Would people always refuse to see him, to recognize
what he was?
It would not, could not, be someone in authority,
who would then have to take responsibility. No schoolteacher, or doctor, or specialist had been able to say,
'That is what he is': neither could any policeman, or
police doctor, or social worker. But suppose one day
someone who was an amateur of the human condition,
perhaps an anthropologist of an unusual kind, actually
saw Ben, let's say standing on a street with his mates,
or in a police court, and admitted the truth. Admitted
curiosity ... what then? Could Ben, even now, end up
sacrificed to science? What would they do with him?
Carve him up? Examine those cudgel-like bones of his,
those eyes, and find out why his speech was so thick
and awkward?
If this did not happen - and her experience with him
until now said it was unlikely - then what she foresaw
for him was even worse. The gang would continue to
support themselves by theft, and sooner or later would
be caught. Ben, too. In police hands he would fight,
and roar and stamp about and bellow, out of control
with rage, and they would drug him, because they had
to, and before very long he would be as he had been
when she had found him dying, looking like a giant
slug, pallid and limp in his cloth shroud.
Or perhaps he could evade being caught? Was he
clever enough? These mates of his, his gang, certainly
were not, giving themselves away by their excitement,
their elation.
Harriet sat there quietly, with the television sounds
and their voices coming from next door; and she
sometimes looked at Ben quickly, and then away; and
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she wondered how soon they would all simply go off,
perhaps not knowing they would not return. She
would sit there, beside the quiet soft shine of the pool
that was the table, and wait for them to come back, but
they would not come back.
And why should they stay in this country? They
could easily take off and disappear into any number of
the world's great cities, join the underworld there, live
off their wits. Perhaps quite soon, in the new house
she would be living in (alone) with David, she would
be looking at the box, and there, in a shot on the News
of Berlin, Madrid, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, she
would see Ben, standing rather apart from the crowd,
staring at the camera with his goblin eyes, or searching
the faces in the crowd for another of his own kind.
159
Doris Lessing
Ben, in the World
'A wonderful novel, flawless as a black pearl'
Daily Mail
'Outstanding ... A tour de force that poses stark questions
about modern-day Britain and what it is to be human.'
Sunday Times
'Ben, in the World picks up the story of Ben Lovatt, the
nean-
derthal anti-child who in The Fifth Child experiences the
family as an engine of hatred, rejection and perfectionism
mobilised against him. Now an adult, Ben inhabits the world
of the modem freak: the world of the homeless, the unregistered, the unwanted. With the mind of a child in a giant,
simian body, he is at once vulnerable and threatening, capable of violence and terribly dependent upon approval and
trust . . . Lessing has a striking ability to illustrate human
moral worth through such a simple lens. In this short, gripping and tragic novel, she conveys a powerful message about
the limits of love and the destructive power of selfishness;
and most of all about our brutal desire to live our lives unfettered by the helpless, by those who slow us down with their
need for kindness.'
Sunday Express
'Ben, In the World is huge in scope, humanity and pathos.
Lessing created a monster; her triumph is that he not only
personifies the human yearning to belong, but that we also
come to love him.'
Daily Telegraph
flamingo